rmilewsk,

We really do appreciate your loyalty. Our canceling the 997 last year was a necessary decision. We literally had thousands of interested customers, but we found so many things wrong that the factory was unable or unwilling to address that the decision to us was clear even though we knew we would take a large hit.

We are planning an update soon on the 978. As it is obvious to many, the development process is slower than we want but the progress towards what we want in this product is moving nicely. Based upon some customer feedback we have altered some features and that necessitated a more robust DSP. We will soon send out an update to all on what the 978 will contain.

We are also being extremely cautious about ease of use, and reliability. Every company, regardless of size, has had problems in varying degrees when launching their processors. Some have had severe ongoing issues and we very aware of what that means for customer confidence.

Our friends at Marantz did an absolutely great job with their processor, but even they had a few glitches that had to be addressed. Also please appreciate how long it took them to launch an HDMI 1.4 product (and they are part of a billion dollar conglomerate). We have a design team that is scattered around the world (Europe, India, China, and here in the US) We are working to get it right and of course we are also working with Audyssey to make sure their interface and ours ties together.

Logic would tell you that we need this product as much as you want it (After all we have a line of power amps that will be paired with this processor to say nothing of other accessories). So are efforts are not casual. That said, our task is to correctly pull all of the various elements together and I can say with no hesitation this is the most complicated product we have ever developed, in a world where technology is changing every year.

Thanks for keeping the faith.

Peter