Well, I couldn't take it any longer. My dedicated HT room is still under construction, and all of my HT gear has been boxed up since I packed it up for moving back in September! I broke down tonight and unpacked my speakers, amps, and other miscellany and set up a temporary home theater in the master bedroom. The 990 compelled me!

I'm trying to give it as thorough a workout as this arrangement will allow. So far I'm very pleased with its performance on movies. Jury is still out on music, but I have to become re-accustomed to my PSB Stratus Silver i's, as I haven't heard them in almost 3/4 of a year. I'll report back after my brain has burned in.

I've run the auto-setup, played with the "display timeout" feature which shuts off the VFD after a period of inactivity, and renamed one of my inputs for kicks. I'm using a mixture of single-ended and balanced outputs (mains+center are single-ended, by surrounds are running off of a small Carver pro amp, XLR out of the 990 to the XLR ins on the amp). I'm running S-Video out of an old DVD player, through the 990, and into a Dell LCD (hey, this is temporary..). Video quality looks as good as I would hope for this setup. I can't really practically set up my projector up there, so I can't comment much further on video quality for the time being.

So far, so good. It's not perfect. I'm hoping some of the minor imperfections will be fixed with firmware updates as time goes on, as they are mostly nit-picky user interface things. For now, though, I feel this is a great upgrade to the 950. It fixes most of the things I found frustrating on the 950, and adds some great new features. It's a killer deal for someone just getting into separates for the first time, or any of us who want to maximize price/performance.

Outlaw's really giving a lot of bang for the buck, here. Kudos to them for that.