My sarcasm filter must be broken.

Google is your friend.

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=outlaw+audio+financials

Best,

Ritz, Peter is president at Atlantic Technology, a speaker company that is based in the Boston area (same as Outlaw). ATI is a completely different entity that operates out of California, and Peter has never been on staff there - prior to Atlantic Tech, he was at NAD for many years.

Oops, I think Gonk is correct. My bad. The names of the two companies are very similar. ATI (the amp company) is Morris Kessler's (who also started SAE...remember them?). Another person at SAE, Ed Miller, was also one of the founders of the earlier incarnation of Sherwood. Funny how the same names keep cropping up.

Best,

Sherwood is the local brand for a Korean company that developed the R-972 receiver which Outlaw was planning to use as the platform for the Model 997. Sherwood's parent company is no longer in the picture because the R-972 failed to meet Outlaw's requirements. The Model 978 was developed from the ground up in conjunction with a completely different manufacturing partner. A receiver version of the Model 978 would not have any relationship to the R-972, just as the Model 978 will have no relationship to the Model 997.

I don't think a receiver version of the Model 978 is likely to be practical, both considering the products they would be competing with and because they can simply bundle a Model 978 with a Model 7075 and achieve the same thing. That's just me, though, and I've been wrong before...


The 5-9 person count seems reasonable from what I've experienced when communicating with Outlaw. They have some staff that are involved in product development (such as Peter and Scott), although I doubt there's anyone who focuses solely on that, and they have some staff that are involved in sales and tech support and other business functions. Their design work is not all done in-house, because (as you noted) they can't support the payroll costs of having teams of engineers and software developers on staff for designing power amps, analog audio boards, digital audio boards, video processing boards, power supplies, and firmware when they develop such a wide range of products and keep them in production for such long life cycles. Good power amp designers would not necessarily be of any use on a surround processor or speaker design.

Outlaw's annual expenses will be purchasing (buying products from their manufacturing partners), R&D (paying designers or manufacturing partners for help in implementing new designs or updating existing designs), and then other things like payroll, rent, web hosting services, and advertising.

And someone posted recently that Jeff Hipps (who was at Sherwood for a number of years and was involved with the R-965, P-965, and R-972) is now at ATI. It's funny how this sort of thing happens in the consumer electronics industry.

It happens in other industries, too, of course. I have HVAC equipment vendors who have worked for several of the big names (including one quite good vendor who over the span of about two years ended up doing sales and engineering support for all four big names in chillers - Carrier, Trane, York, and then McQuay). I've seen architects and engineers bounce between design firms, too.

For whatever reason, there is still a real lack of choice when it comes with Audyssey XT32 components. But I agree, and I'm sure they know this too, the longer the 978 takes to get out of the door, the more sales they lose.

FWIW, they're getting very close to losing mine, and it gives me no pleasure to say so.

Gary- What would you choose instead though?

I'm currently pricing the Integra DHC-80.3 which is certainly overkill for me and costs more than I really wanted to spend. OTOH, it certainly has all the features I want. Most importantly, it's not vaporware, and seems well supported by Onkyo.

I'm also curious to see whether Marantz introduces a successor to the AV7005 at this year's CES.

I keep hoping for a successor to the AV7005 too.

I had looked at Onkyo before too, but I just get scared off with all the hardware problems. The last one I came across was some kind of HDMI (or USB? can't remember) board failure or something several months back on the 80.2.