I wonder if people would consider the Onkyo TX-NR818 a "budget" unit? Price-wise, it's only $800, but in terms of features and video capabilities, I'd place it in the same category as much higher priced units. Maybe it's time for Outlaw to jump back on the Onkyo bandwagon? It seems to be a prime candidate for a processor for folks that plan to use external amplification and are on a tighter budget.

Best,

^^^

I believe that that Onkyo cannot set the distances and levels of the subwoofers independently unlike other XT32 SSP's and AVR's. That's a limitation for some.

I believe Kevin's correct. The TX-NR818 appears to be one of the very few (possibly the only) AVR/AVP which does not bundle Sub EQ HT with MultEQ XT32. I think it's been confirmed that for Onkyo products, inclusion of Sub EQ HT starts with the TX-NR1010.

Interesting tidbit for users that are going to deploy more than one subwoofer. There's always the TX-NR3008 and TX-NR3009, but that adds another $500 to the price tag. Perhaps those prices will come down further when the NR3010 and NR1010 sales are ramped up and retailers are discounting the older models even further.

Best,

Who did it =>

Could it be Cary Audio? They are in the pre/pro business, they are smaller like Outlaw, etc. They haven't had Audyssey in the past, but maybe they have a new one coming out.

I figure it would be more likely someone who is coming out with a product using Sabre DACs rather than Audyssey. Maybe this manufacturer was selceted because they could, among other things, offer a good price on the DACs because they could leverage volume from another product?

I doubt it has anything to do with the DACs. I think it's related to the core DSP functionality. A DAC is easy to implement, and they aren't all that expensive. HDMI/all the flavors of DD/DTS/9.1/11.2/room EQ/software/hardware/audio/video/etc, is a lot more difficult to implement and integrate.

The key is the HUGE difficulty in inplementing HDMI. HUGE. Even the big brands have no implemented it perfectly, because it's an imperfect spec. It was not designed for consumer convenience, as we've been told. It was designed to protect content providers.

Could it be Nuforce? they just released a new prepro AVP-18?

Nuforce

Bob

I've got the pic of the back end of the Outlaw 978 and the 2 models are miles apart. The nuforce bares a closer resemblance to an Oppo 93, but not very close.