Good discussion, but I can't believe no one has brought up the Sherwood P-965. The 990 twin, but now with SNAP room EQ, it looks to fill a nitch very few other processors fill. When you have a couple of peaks in your bass, as I do, this can be a very important feature.

I also want to log in on the 990 is not as good as the Arcam debate. I have a question I hope some one can answer. Does the 990 have discrete 192 kHz 24-bit DAC’s for all channels, or is this done via a single chip?

I guess I always assumed there was individual DAC's for each channel, but while reading a review recently on the Arcam AVP-700 I found it uses a single chip for all eight channels for D/A and A/D conversion.

http://www.ultimateavmag.com/surroundsoundpreampprocessors/1205arcam/

Is this normal, or are they cutting corners with the AVP-700?

Also, it was mentioned the 990 was not designed to compete with the Arcam line, so was the AVP-700 designed to compete with the 990, P-965, AVM30, etc? List price of just over two grand, and it has balanced outputs, HDMI switching. Seems like something has to give. If this model also sounds much better than the 990 then it looks like Arcam has hit a home run.

Anyone heard both that can comment?