When I bought the 990, I bought it because I was sold on the fact that there would be constant firmware updates and improvements. In the 5 years I have owned the unit, there has only been one firmware update. Am I to take it that even thought the unit is no longer offered for sale that the support is null also? If this is the case then I was badly misled by your advertising rhetoric. I know that there is an ongoing effort to finish the 978, and I understand that effort to an extent. But to have advertised the 990 as a future adjusted unit is just wrong. Don't get me wrong, I love the 990 but would have been more satisfied if I had known that no more updates would be coming after 2008. Next time, just ditch all the fancy talk about the future and sell your products on the basis of their performance. People won't feel as misled. Thank you.

Are you having a specific problem or is there a type of improvement you are looking for?

Otherwise, my expectation is that the 990 should be able to support all of the technology claimed in the manual, but not beyond that. So for example, if the DD 5.1 audio specifications prior to the last date of new sales included a specific flag that had not been used until now and was unsupported, then I would expect a firmware upgrade. On the other hand, I don't think its reasonable to expect Outlaw to support HDMI on the 990 or provide video processing that was never part of the original product.

I have some things that I'd like to get resolved.

1) I have found that the audio latency is different when decoding Dolby Digital and DTS. Dolby is way longer, like 100 ms more, than DTS. So each time I play a title, I have to check if it's in DD or DTS ans then go into the menu to manually adjust the delay on my optical input. I don't know if my Blu-ray player or the 990 is to blame, but in the end, some way to customize the delay per codec would be nice. I have a 109 inches front projection screen, so any lip-sync delays are spotted right away. This is not subtle. Actually, the DD latency is so long that when I had my previous CRT TV, the audio would lag the picture even when 0 ms delay was used.

2) I use a coaxial digital input for my CD player. Often, when skiping a song (pushing "next" on my player), the 990 will drop the connection and mute. I have to cycle thru another input, then getting back to CD to have sound. This is extremely annoying.

3) When starting a CD or a digital file from my computer (both connected with digital connection) the 990 will take like one second to un-mute, so the begining of most songs is lost.

No, I don't have any problems that I know about. But if you advertise a unit as a "future forward" component, people do expect to have updates to new technology when possible. I know the HDMI situation isn't possible but I'm sure there are other thing that could be improved. Oppo is good for providing updates even to their discontinued products because that is how they advertised them. If Outlaw advertises this way, they should do the same. That's all I'm saying. I think I mentioned I thought the product was good. It is just in the way that it was advertised that I feel a little misled. Maybe much ado about nothing but I expect what was advertised. And one firmware update in 6 years is not "future forward", IMO.

The lip sync delay is normally needed because audio is decoded much faster than video and tends to lead the video signal thus allowing us to apply a delay to the audio signal is what "syncs" the two. Since it is apparently the video portion that is causing the problem and the 990 does no video processing I would think that the Blu-ray player is the issue. Having a way to tie the audio delay to individual codecs sounds like a good idea but it would eat up too much processor memory. There is no realistic way for Outlaw to bring the 990 into the future but they did include all of the known codecs at the time and provided enough processing to decode them. They also future proofed the 990 by including an analog input from a BDP which allows the newer codecs to be decoded in the BDP and played through the 990. I am not sure how much more they could have done. The firmware version released a few years ago primarily dealt with the way the 990 did bass management and not much more. Most people understood what they were buying when they purchased the 990, a high quality bang for the buck processor with few frills and designed to last through several iterations of HDMI and the new codecs.

Not trying to bust your chops here, but can you provide an example of what you might be looking for in terms of an improvement. For example if the new BR Codec's were supported on the digital inputs that the 990 can accept, I could see that as being a valid request. IIRC, however, they are only supported over HDMI. Personally, I can see that Deromax's issue about the muting on digital input as something for a revison (it seems like providing an option to turn off muting could be easy to implement).

However, I can also appreciate from a manufacturer's perspective that there should be a time limit on firmware revisions. Perhaps 3-5 years from the date of last sale or the date of a posting on the sales site that the product has been frozen and no future revisions for the product are likely to be made. Of course that presumes a publicly available firmware revision request and acceptance list.

FWIW, I seem to recall that Outlaw did announce at somepoint that the last 990 firmware revision was going to be the last.

No, you aren't busting my chops and I understand your POV. Let me ask you what you would consider this statement to mean?

Q. Is the Model 990's upgradeable for possible future enhancements?
A. Yes. Both the unit's system firmware and the software that drives the surround processor are easily upgradeable by either USB or RS-232 connections.

Would you have expected more than one update in the life of the 990 after reading that? That's all I'm saying. I just thought I'd see more improvements to the system over the time I have had the unit. I have no problem with the performance. And yes I am talking about Codecs and the such. With technology moving as fast as it does, I would have thought there would have been at least 6 updates to this point. But I won't beat a dead horse. The barn door has been closed so there's really no since worrying over spilled milk. It is what it is and I was just trying to say you don't need gimmicks to sell your products. They are strong enough to sell on their specs. That's all. No biggie.

Thanks for the post. Really, all I was trying to say is what you said at the end of your post, that the unit specs are good enough to sell the unit without the gimmick statement of "future upgradability". Moving on...

Mr_Freedom

I can see your point of view and would tend to agree that original owners could have this expectation (especially for items that could be addressed). I personally wish that things like the parametric equalizer the P965 had was made available (perhaps with a memory upgrade).

Personally, however, I had no such expectations as I bought my 990 in its current post production resale phase.

I remember the speculation about the potential of EQ in the 990 because it was based on the same platform as the Sherwood P-965. It would be interesting to know why the Outlaws either couldn't turn it on or decided not to.

The only upgrade I had always hoped for, which never seemed difficult, is a separate bypass on/off setting for the multichannel analog input. Full digital bass management on the multichannel analog input was a great selling point 7 years ago, because universal DVD players that played SACDs and DVD-As had non-existent, very limited, or inconsistent bass management capabilities. The next pre/pros that could do this were like those from Anthem at 4 to 6 times the cost of the 990. With Blu-ray players like the Oppo BDP-83SE and 95, it would be nice to be able to bypass the 990's bass management for multichannel analog and let the superior digital and analog electronics in the Oppo do what they do. Unfortunately, I still need the 990 to do bass management on most other sources that get played a lot, the cable box, a media player, and a VCR (rarely), and the only way to disable it from the multichannel analog is to make all speakers "large" which disables it for all sources. This is possible to do, but a nuisance every time switching sources.