*I* had hoped we'd see more self powered speakers and within those, class D amps that were precisely matched to the driver they powered. No dice though.

No love for whats proven and time tested? I mean yes new technology is cool and very much the future, but lets not crap on out former loves. The grass aint always greener.

Ill still stand behind my "boat anchor" amp. Ill live with the heat (although mine doesnt get hot at all?)and added electricity in order to have that class A/B lush mid range and aggressive imaging that it delivers. Until I hear a digital amp that really delivers Ill stay the course too, sound quality is worth the extra $5 a month in electric...and if it did get I would use that heat on the winter?

If the technology can be made to work, the idea of a digital output to the amps is definitely intriguing, but even if we see those amps enter production I worry about trying to do it with today's HDMI. We start with the nightmare that is splitting HDMI - most processors with two HDMI outputs don't have both active at the same time because of the HDCP problems that it generates. They we get to the issue of controlling the audio output via HDMI: is it PWM or PCM? While the HDMI spec may theoretically work with PWM, has anybody actually done it? And when will processors incorporate the software to provide that signal? Then we have the issue of what you do if you don't have all of your amp channels in a single amp chassis. We have theaters with five channels, seven channels, and now (with the arrival of PLIIz) possibly even nine channels. How do we handle that if not by creating a single audio connection for each speaker? That connection gets messy in a hurry unless you require people to buy an amp with all of the channels in a single chassis.

A couple of decades ago, there was a similar argument as folks wistfully described their devotion to their fire bottle amps. Time marches on. I suspect Outlaw's fortunes would be a bit better if they ride the front of the wave rather than trying to cling to the past. There's still folks that make a living by putting together fancy class A triode amps with lots of brushed aluminum and other shiny bits, but that number is dwindling and the price of their products are escalating towards the stratosphere while the cost of quality digital amps are steadily falling.

Call me crazy, but I think a fella stands to make more profit selling 100,000 Hondas than 500 Lambos.

Um....you mean like almost every powered subwoofer sold today (including those from Outlaw) going back a decade or so?

Well it will be a pretty boring system if it's composed of 8 self powered subs. What I'd like to see is more on the lines of the Martin Logan self powered speakers; I'd like to see self powered FULL RANGE speakers with optimally matched amps integrated, ready to be driven via a simple and cheap TOSLink optical interface, or via standard analog line inputs.

That would be ideal for me.

Wouldn't it be cool to have the speakers self powered and wireless. It would gain a lot of WAF.