I think Outlaw was fine until HDMI came along. It walloped a lot of higher end companies too. And the Trinnov thing didn't help, but now that all of that is behind them, it should be easier to bring a pre-pro to market.

This matches my observation that "HD" from Dish and DirecTV aren't much better than a good upscaled DVD. And that is still true today. Not like it's gotten any better. If anything, Dish and DirecTV might have gotten worse because of their neverending desire to cram more mediocre channels into the same limited bandwidth.

Of course Blu-ray isn't perfect; nothing ever is in this world of ours. Blu-ray uses MPEG 4 for compression instead of MPEG 2 that was used for DVD. MPEG 2 is regarded as providing better PQ but isn't as compressible as MPEG 4. Because of the increase in resolution to 1080P together with the sufficient quality and higher compression ratios obtained through MPEG 4, it was chosen not only for Blu-ray but also for the now defunct HD-DVD.

Fiber optics should have enough bandwidth to allow 1080P video at the same quality as Blu-ray. But fiber optics is very expensive to deploy, specially in large countries like the US and Canada. It becomes cheaper and feasible for large metropolitan areas with high population densities but in small rural areas, the high cost makes it much less appealing. You must also consider the networking infrastructure needed to support the high bandwidth attainable by the fiber optics, i.e. the large routers. All this together makes it quite expensive.

I'm glad that you can discern the SQ difference between FLAC and MP3 in such a modest setup. Most people nowadays unfortunately don't care, choosing the convenience of storing thousands of terrible sounding MP3s in little storage space over the sound quality of FLAC or uncompressed audio.

I hope your shipping prediction for the 978 comes before mine (November 14).

Nice comparison table! Thanks for the link. I've saved the page for future reference. This supports what many of us here have been stating in recent posts and what we've observed through the last decade or so.

Yes Oppo showed the way but unfortunately they didn't want to get into the business of developing a processor like the 978 despite the many requests of Oppo loyalists as Gonk reported in a previous post.

i still have these logitech speakers. i am using a better setup atm($400). i have uninstalled spotify long time ago and i only listend to good mastered music now. the speakers is from a swedish company "dynavoice dm-5" so the bottleneck should be the room. i can hear difference between sampling rates with my current setup(ribbon tweeters).

with the result in the hand it's always easy to say what should have bean done and what shouldn't, model 978 is a great example of that after 2 year delay, i doubt outlaw counted with that when they decided to include stuff like hdmi 1.4a. i don't know about a single prepro or reciever without issues like audio dropout at launch, it might be worth the longer time it took if model 978 is bugfree from start.

I believe that the Trinnov episode with Sherwood hurt Outlaw more than anything.

As for HDMI, there are tons of devices that use it in the market, not only A/V gear like receivers, DVD/BD players but also a multitude of small boxes like the Rokus, Apple TV, etc. To implement HDMI, an EE designer chooses a System-on-chip (SoC) like those from Analod Devices or others that integrate all the HDMI functionality (transmitters, receivers and switches). The complexity really comes after HDMI. When you have to integrate a pair of general purpose DSPs with a memory subsystem running some form of room correction into a bus along with all the other circuits (HDMI, S/PDIF, DACs, etc.) and then control everything with some proprietary software or an imbedded OS. All of this requires a lot of digital circuit design and low-level programming expertise from a team of engineers; the R&D involved is complex and expensive.

In the days of DVD with Dolby digital and DTS with no room correction, A/V processors and receivers used mostly off-the-shelve ICs and fixed-functionality DSPs that provided most of the features. There was much less routing and custom processing of the data involved.

These dynavoice dm-5 speakers have an interesting design at a very affordable price. I like ribbon speakers. They remind me a lot of the Ikon line of speakers made by DALI of Denmark.

You get what you pay for in this case. From what I've read, it seems the speakers are well constructed, but don't sound particularly good. Pretty speakers are nice. Pretty speakers that don't sound very good...not so nice. For about the same $$$ you can get a pair of lower end Polks like the TSI200/300 and likely get better sound if you're on a budget. The Polks aren't particularly pretty, nor are they the greatest sounding, but the TSI line seems to be a nice balance between affordable and competent sound quality.

Best,

I have read a lot about them and most info says the are comparible with much higher priced speakers soundwise. http://www.hififorum.nu/artiklar/DynavoiceDFDM5/2.html the tnt audio review was the second to complain about the intensity of the treamble. Many people states they need a lot of time to break in but sounds really good after that, "brake in" usally means getting used to the new sound. Dynavoice definition us meant to play clean and somehow neatral for the price, i wasn't able to listend to speakers si it was a bit of gamble, i think it turned out good.

As for hdmi:
There is currently 3 standards used, hdmi, dvi, displayport. Displayport seams to be much better than hdmi but unfortionatly it's mostly used in computer monitors, a single displayport cable may replace 2 dvi cables and one usb cable!