This is awesome! A link to the announcement was posted over at AV123's forum as well. Consider me signed up and saving!!!

Hallelulah!!! certainly looks like it will be well worth the wait.

Count me in, I have been waiting on the fence to finally jump into Blu Ray so with this announcement plus the new Oppo Blu Ray player coming around the same time, looks like a great way to start the new year.

I guess it's time to start looking for a buyer for the trusted ol 990.

Hope everything goes according to plan for the Outlaw design/manufacturing teams.

Wow, this is bizarre. After two intensive days of book editing, I decided to goof off this afternoon and watch "Stardust" (HD DVD) and "Heroes S2" (Blu-ray). While I was watching, and listening to the tracks passed to analog inputs for the HD and optical for the Blu (so I didn't get the DTS-MA lossless quality), I found myself wondering when the Outlaws were going to announce a pre/pro that would accept these new formats in digital form.

Now I just have to watch for that signup list. (Ah, the giddy waiting that I last experienced with the original Outlaw 950. )

Bob

Did they mention how many HDMI ins/outs?

The 997 will have 4 HDMI inputs and 1 HDMI output.

Peter

Phono preamp?

SACD and DVD-A decoding from HDMI input?

In the Announcement, Scott says "external beta testing by your fellow Outlaws". Is there anyway to make a request to beta test the 997?
I've done 10 years of beta testing for Microsoft and a 2 years for a major cell phone company.

I think Nine Hundred & Ninety Seven dollars would be the perfect price point.

Pulling everything together is an all-new graphical user interface and menu system based on the easy-to-use system originally developed by the Outlaws for the Model 990. This means that anyone familiar with the existing Model 990 and Model 970 processors will be up and running in minutes.

Does this mean that the new 997 will actually have a GUI overlay similar to the Denon 3808? Or will this be just the analog interface found on the 970? The Sherwood Newcastle brochure shows a GUI similar to the Denon 3808 but appears much easier to navigate (based on pictures from SN). Also, will it overlay on screen similar to the present 970 (and 990 I believe)? I know the Denon will overlay using HDMI, while others will not overlay the information over HDMI unless it is a 480i signal. SN calls it "Advance GUI display" Just curious for those of us who cannot read the small print on components. By the way the SN 972 looks very promising but if they do what they did with the P965, I'm in.

We don't really know what they are doing with the GUI. I would suspect that it will not look quite the same as the 950/970/990 menu structure simply because of how much has been added, but they may try to retain as much "keep it simple" as possible.

As for SACD/DVD-A decoding via HDMI, any HDMI input that will take multichannel PCM will do DVD-A (once MLP is unpacked by the player, that's what you end up with). I don't recall if Sherwood has mentioned DSD support for those (few) players that can output it, but I would say odds are better than 50/50 they have DSD support. (Of course, opinions on whether it sounds better to output DSD or PCM from SACD's vary from person to person and seem to depend heavily on the equipment being used).

As for beta testing, you can always just ask them - that's how I ended up doing testing for OPPO's 981HD two years ago. At one time Oytlaw had a beta test application of some sort, but I don't know what they do now.