I've traded an email or two with Jeff over the years. He struck me as a good guy.

I saw this post over at AVS before I left work, and was thinking about it some in the car. In the absence of comments directly from Outlaw, a few thoughts came to my mind. Most of the thoughts related to the 886 offer, although some of it relates to that offer's timing relative to the R-972.

First, the Onkyo deal has clearly been under consideration for a while. You don't kick out a 50+ page manual for something as complex as the 886 over a weekend, after all. When did they decide to explore that option as a stop-gap measure? June? May? Earlier? It must have been a while back. For all we know, they started the process back in late winter or early spring when the 997 got pushed back then and weren't able to get all the details worked out until recently.

Second, with that in mind, why pull the trigger on it now? They know they will be 60 days behind the R-972, and if that 60-day window starts in a couple of weeks that still puts us into November. Twiddling their thumbs while Sherwood is selling 972's isn't going to be any fun, and if they had this deal in place they may as well use it.

Third, we don't know what is happening with beta testing. Our only point of reference for this parallel development process is the R-965 and Model 990, two products which used basically the same platform (DVI switching and balanced outputs notwithstanding) but had significantly different firmware and were released over a year apart. That example involved a lot of separate testing for Outlaw because they implemented a different user interface, different bass management, and some different video switching options. In this case, though, they may be planning to use much more similar firmware. There may still be differences, though, if only because of the hardware changes. Outlaw's likely to want to test their version as much as they can, no matter how slight the differences are. How might that separate testing relate to the contractual 60-day delay? I was just trading some posts on another forum about the 886 deal and the ongoing wait for the 997, and the current problems at AV123 came up. Considering the myriad challenges facing AV123 these days, it makes some real sense to hedge your bets and stay as conservative as possible with projected delivery dates. For that matter, the tumultuous arrival of the 972 (delayed repeatedly over the course of nearly two years) is a good argument for caution in this regard. Maybe the 997 will start shipping to consumers by mid-November, exactly 60 days behind this big shipment of 972's. That'd be cool. But if there's even a chance of a couple bugs showing up soon and holding the 997 up, Outlaw's not going to want to make any promises - even though they must be chomping at the bit to get this thing shipped out. At least I wouldn't want to if I were in their shoes.

Anyway, that's what occurred to me...