A brief update is in order - I've had the Outlaws hooked up since late Tuesday night, but have done very little critical listening yet. I haven't even re-calibrated the 990, which I have tried to do the last two mornings before things got in the way. They have been getting broken in a fair bit (leaving the radio playing while at work each day), but that's about the only thing I've acheived with them that I'd wanted to this week. Between this being my wife's last week at her current job, my car breaking down (the working theory is a tank of bad gas, although I won't know that for certain for another hour or so), and a couple late nights of work, my impressions so far are brief, preliminary, and based on too little setup to give the speakers a chance to be their best.

Having said all that, I'll also repeat what I told a co-worker yesterday afternoon. He's listened to my old Paradigms several times and is very fond of my system, and after asking how the Outlaws sounded he asked, "They don't sound better than the Paradigms, do they?" Despite not having set things up at all yet, I found myself saying, "Yes, I think they do - at least a little." My wife is also pleased with both the sound (as the daughter of a hard-core audiophile, she has a tendency to notice changes to the system even when she isn't paying attention) and the appearance. The finish is beautiful - pictures on the site and the ones I've taken don't really do them justice - and I really like the metal grilles. I'll post a picture or two shortly as a little something to tide the thread over until I can spend a weekend really putting them through their paces (calibrated, placement tweaked, switches experimented with, and some good listening fun).
It was an odd process, to be honest. For several years now (probably around four years, actually), my wife has been interested in the possibility of replacing our tower speakers with bookshelf speakers, but I never pursued it too far. The arrival of Outlaw's speakers (and particularly some of Tonygeno's early comments about them) piqued my curiousity enough to get me thinking about actually doing a speaker upgrade of some sort. I might have gone back to Paradigm and demo'ed some Studio/20's and a new matching center, but the local representation dried up and I'm not sure if anybody has picked the line back up. Because the Bookshelves were what triggered the discussions of an upgrade, I talked a bit with Outlaw about the speakers and their design. I liked the approach that they were taking with the speaker products, and after some discussion with Scott I decided to give them a try...
Will do, Tony. I'm looking forward to it...