I thought I'd weigh in here, as well. I recently replaced my 990 with a Cary Cinema 11a.

The Cary is a considerable upgrade in audio quality and price point (!). The Cary sounds fantastic, but then it should for its price. It has exactly the feature set I need - it's an audio only processor that decodes all of the latest HD formats. I'm already using a separate video processor (DVDO Edge), so an audio-only processor was a good fit for me.

However, the Cary 11a has been buggy from the beginning. It's finally reached a point (with FW 1.04) where it is stable and the intended functionality actually works. I was watching the AVS thread closely to see when the 11a would be ready for prime time before making my purchase. Even so, there are some smaller problems that still remain to be cleaned up.

And the Cary is not the only new high-end processor that has had major problems and has required multiple firmware updates to function correctly.

This is an area where I believe Outlaw really excels. Outlaw would never release a product this buggy. So, with the delay you are going to get a product that functions as it should right out of the box on the first shipment. And THAT is priceless. :-)

-Brent