those of us that have been around the Outlaws for a long time are no strangers to waiting...but in waiting, the fruit is usually sweeter when it has ripened on the vine...they'll get the right product out to us and at a nice price...and I predict gonk'll peak under the tent and get us some dope on this...
Bill

The reason, I suggested building a receiver on the 990 platform, is that Outlaw has tended to keep its receivers slightly below its top of the line pre/pro in terms of capability and sound quality.

Using that as a base assumption, it strikes me that the 990 is already physically built on a receiver frame. It certainly has been more stable the 970 and presumably is better musically as well. About all it is missing is a chip upgrade to support HDMI 1.3 input and possibly the new musical modes for Blu-Ray. I see that later as optional since the 990 already has 7 channels of analog input.

The 990 platform is at end of life - it's still a great piece of gear, but I don't think it makes sense to invest in developing new products on that platform at this point. It's simply not going to be competitive over the ~2 to 3 year life span that Outlaw's receivers typically have. A new non-HDMI receiver in 2011 will be a dinosaur, and retrofitting it with HDMI v1.3 is a major undertaking that is simply not practical. If it were easy, we'd have seen a "991" processor that added HDMI to the 990 a year or two ago. Aside from needing a different DSP to handle decoding of the new formats, you need an entire HDMI receiving/transmitting section to feed it and a whole slew of new code to support all of that. Once you do that, you've replaced so much that what's left isn't recognizable - you are halfway to designing a new platform, and the work required to retain the old is likely just going to slow you down and add to the development costs.

Another thought. It's possible that the Cirrus 49400 chipset has been EOF'ed (end of life) by Cirrus meaning that everyone who was using the part had to make a last time buy of all the parts they would need to build a last batch of product. That could be why the 1070 was discontinued, with the last of the parts going to keep the 970 and 990 going a bit longer.