Heck of a post, Lizard King. I've got to run to some meetings shortly, but want to toss out a few thoughts about what we might see in a future Outlaw receiver...
1). Improved SQ - Better Dacs, less Op amps.More power say 90 watts times 7 in the receiver.
Price will drive this one. I have no doubt that they'll do the best they can for their target price point, but with everything else crammed under the hood of something like the 1070 there are only so many ways to control cost.
2). More control over bass MGMT, esp analog, not default THX 80 Hz set. Also, allow 5 or 10HZ increments. This should alao be in the next 990.
5Hz increments might be a bit more control than is really needed, but 10Hz increments could be handy. Analog bass management, however, is not likely to get any better than what the 1070 does now. Even a global adjustable crossover takes a lot to implement in the analog domain. Doing more than that would require a 7.1 version of the old ICBM, and it still doesn't allow for time delay or channel trim. That's a mighty big cost to add to any product, especially when the trend is to move away from analog input. The only folks using the multichannel analog input on a next-gen product are going to be folks with
really high end sources (like a modded 3930) or folks with older DVD-A/SACD players that they don't want to replace. Everyone else will be using HDMI inputs to deliver multichannel PCM, DSD, or bitstreams of DD+, TrueHD, or DTS-HD to the receiver, and those signals will have no use for complex and expensive analog bass management. If the next generation Outlaw products retain the analog bass management that they introduced with the 950, I bet it'll also be the last generation to offer it. HDMI's support for multichannel PCM creates a digital pipe that comes very close to making multichannel analog inputs obsolete.
4) A feature that alows you to trim bass in the sub from rumbling like in Movies.
I think a few discrete controls like sub trim would be very well received - center trim would likely also fall into this category.
5) Better grade speaker posts and RCA female plugs, wire inside the unit, better grade Caps,etc.
Like number 1 above, this is going to be a place where they have to balance cost and benefit.
7) More analog inputs than just the One!
I really doubt we'll see this one. Three or four years ago, this might have been more useful (when we had DVD-A and SACD standalone players in the last format war), but today the only time you'll see even a single multichannel analog source connected to an HDMI v1.x receiver will be an existing DVD-A/SACD player. Blu-ray and HD-DVD folks will be using the HDMI connections just as soon as they get the chance, because that is the connection around which the hardware for both formats has been built.
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