Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

C'mon now people, all they did was announce a new receiver in their product offerings. Yes, I agree, it could signal further delay on the 978. But lets not panic.

The 6006 is selling for $1,200 with amps. Some will not use external amps with it and be perfectly happy.

The 978 w/o amps was targeted at $1,400 (Who knows what they're targeting now). It is a higher end unit than the 6006. The point of the 978 is sound. "Bells and Whistles" are not what sells the 978, unless you consider Auddyssey MultEQ XT32 to be such. My point is that the Marantz 6006 is targeted to a different audience. Time will tell if the 978 delivers.

Whether the 978 is just around the corner or 6 months out, Outlaw keeps making a margin on the Marantz products and are hopefull that they'll generate a few extra sales of their amps in the process. Afterall, there must be a ton of sunk costs in the R&D of the 997/998/978 that Outlaw needs to recover.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

True enough. But that's a pretty amazing set of overlapping features that would be for sale on the same website, especially for a pre-pro that will cost more than this receiver.

My secret hope is that this means that Outlaw actually is about to release a pre-pro that is a bit different. That is, that Outlaw is about to announce that, yes, they've had a pre-pro in beta... but actually it's the 998! And it's got Trinnov! And Dolby Volume! And it all works!

Yes, I know, that's unlikely. But it would be nice.

When pigs fly.

"[W]ith the help of a good Internet search engine, you can prove anything, including that pigs can fly." Martinez v. Board of Parole Hearings, No. C061031, slip op. at 9 (Cal. Ct. App. Apr. 6, 2010) (Sims, J., dissenting).

Tend to agree that the winged porcine solution would be safer bet than any pipe dream of a "skunk works" 998+ built by hard working Yankees...

It is kinda fun to think that the folks that run Outlaw might have the capability to simultaneously work on multiple efforts to pull an end run around delays with the development of one product by leap frogging it with another offering and also sounding a charge against the global imbalance in trade but that is not realistic. Not enough to staff / hours in the day to that AND:

They still sell a nice selection of high value multi-channel amps that are made in the USA to folks everywhere.

They still sell a fair selection of home theatre oriented speaker systems and subwoofers to folks everywhere.

They still appear to be committed to working through issues that came up in closed beta tests of the 978 BEFORE releasing such units to "actual cash buyers" and suffering the loss of reputation that would have resulted. The appearance and feature set of the 978 may not be "fully buzzword compliant". The trade-offs that go along with having a non-mass market product that exists to satisfy a more specialized group on consumers are different than those trade off that "cost no object" type firms might make. For hard core nationalistic shoppers the decisions about assembly should have excluded from even looking at this product a long long time ago...

They still have staff to fix inadvertently changed links / content on this forum.

They have staff to answer questions sent via email or over the phone.

They seem to be intent on offering packages of their US made amps along with current commercial receivers and pre-pros to US based customers in compliance with those manufacturers' marketing restrictions. That takes staff time to negotiate those deals, update the website, coordinate the shipping and a couple a dozen details in creating the sort of "better than the guys who built it" documentation / user guides...

Good people are easy to burn out.

Good post. You actually presented some solid arguments.

>The 6006 is selling for $1,200 with amps. Some will not use external amps with it and be perfectly happy.<
Too bad Marantz does not drop the amps, charge $100 less and we have the new 978?

Bob

For most people on this thread, the real question with the SR6006 is how big are the sound differences between it and the AV7005. While I haven't compared the feature lists in detail, they seem very similar. It might be interesting to see if Outlaw offers a moded SR6006 with the amps disconnected like they did with the SR5005.

The 6006 has Audyssey XT. The 978 will have XT32. That's a pretty big difference IMO.