If you believe what Jeff at Sherwood said, Outlaw may have their own problems/reasons for their announcement of 997 delays.

My email exchange with Jeff today:

Me:

Can you tell me what the current situation is?

What happened to the shipment that was supposed to have arrived in June?

Maybe you decided to avoid the abuse at the AVS thread and didn't see my post, but as I said there, I think it would earn back a lot of goodwill if you would give a bimonthly or monthly status report of 972 activities.

The last one made me feel a lot better, knowing what the issues were and that people were working on them, as opposed to being left out in the cold in an information vacuum.

Let me know if you want to keep any of the info confidential

Jeff:

We are continuing to add dealers. For example, yesterday I was in Detroit. Harry Francis of Audio Dimensions in Royal Oak, who's main lines are Audio Research, Bryston, Vandersteen and Magnapan, auditioned the 972 and I'm happy to report it satisfied his audiophile standards and he agreed to become a dealer. Similar stories are occurring in many parts of the country. We are exhibiting at CEDIA and I believe our
R-972 demo will be mind-altering.

As to availability: we have a large number arriving in early September and they should be in dealers and distributors hands by mid-month.

Jeff 2 min later:

After my previous response, it occurred to me you had asked about June shipments. We did ship around 70 pieces to the market in early July.
Some are now in consumers hands, some may still exist at distributors or dealers and we sent one to each of our representative companies.

Me:

I'm confused.

From what you said it sounds like nothing is amiss.

If that's the case, why did Outlaw do what they did, and why haven't you kept people abreast of the situation at AVS?

It's true there are some real jerks there (BTW AVS has a nice Ignore function), but there are many more that are waiting patiently and politely.

Did any of the 70 get sent to reviewers?

Jeff: The introduction is still slower than I wanted, but units in the field are working well.

I'll let Outlaw speak for themselves.

I made a personal decision to visit AVS infrequently. I saw no reason to respond to theoretical complaints made about a technology that the complainant had never heard nor did I see a reason to prolong debate with the born Cynic or his cronies. I know the receiver is late, you know its late, they know its late. Let's move on. Is the promised performance improvement real and available. If so, will it have been worth the wait. Also, my email address or PM is readily available. Any AVS'r who contacted me via either method has always received a prompt reply.

We expect to ship review units from the large batch that is arriving shortly.
__________________

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...

How long did it take OPPO to do its beta testing with the EAP? Might Outlaw consider a similar approach? Although the 997 is more complex that the BDP-83, they would probably cut down on their time to market.

The BDP-83's hardware was finalized last fall, but they started beta testing before they even had all the features enabled in the firmware (it was the first product developed with that chipset) so we beta tested for months before we even had some of the major features (onboard decoding of TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, DVD-Audio support). The EAP started in March, and they started shipping to folks on the interest list in May.

Frankly, though, the EAP was an unusual case that likely wouldn't work as well in most cases. Would a similar approach work for Outlaw? I don't know. It would depend on several factors, one being production capacity. The BDP-83 will likely sell more units than the 997, so they are building them in a greater quantity. They also have a close relationship with the factory and there were no contractual limitations on when production would ramp up. That allowed them to build a significant quantity. Outlaw may not be able to get a large shipment until that 60-day mark arrives, and if they are close to having it ready for production then they may want to just wait a short time (days or weeks) and start shipping with final production firmware.