If you believe what Jeff at Sherwood said, Outlaw may have their own problems/reasons for their announcement of 997 delays.

My email exchange with Jeff today:

Me:

Can you tell me what the current situation is?

What happened to the shipment that was supposed to have arrived in June?

Maybe you decided to avoid the abuse at the AVS thread and didn't see my post, but as I said there, I think it would earn back a lot of goodwill if you would give a bimonthly or monthly status report of 972 activities.

The last one made me feel a lot better, knowing what the issues were and that people were working on them, as opposed to being left out in the cold in an information vacuum.

Let me know if you want to keep any of the info confidential

Jeff:

We are continuing to add dealers. For example, yesterday I was in Detroit. Harry Francis of Audio Dimensions in Royal Oak, who's main lines are Audio Research, Bryston, Vandersteen and Magnapan, auditioned the 972 and I'm happy to report it satisfied his audiophile standards and he agreed to become a dealer. Similar stories are occurring in many parts of the country. We are exhibiting at CEDIA and I believe our
R-972 demo will be mind-altering.

As to availability: we have a large number arriving in early September and they should be in dealers and distributors hands by mid-month.

Jeff 2 min later:

After my previous response, it occurred to me you had asked about June shipments. We did ship around 70 pieces to the market in early July.
Some are now in consumers hands, some may still exist at distributors or dealers and we sent one to each of our representative companies.

Me:

I'm confused.

From what you said it sounds like nothing is amiss.

If that's the case, why did Outlaw do what they did, and why haven't you kept people abreast of the situation at AVS?

It's true there are some real jerks there (BTW AVS has a nice Ignore function), but there are many more that are waiting patiently and politely.

Did any of the 70 get sent to reviewers?

Jeff: The introduction is still slower than I wanted, but units in the field are working well.

I'll let Outlaw speak for themselves.

I made a personal decision to visit AVS infrequently. I saw no reason to respond to theoretical complaints made about a technology that the complainant had never heard nor did I see a reason to prolong debate with the born Cynic or his cronies. I know the receiver is late, you know its late, they know its late. Let's move on. Is the promised performance improvement real and available. If so, will it have been worth the wait. Also, my email address or PM is readily available. Any AVS'r who contacted me via either method has always received a prompt reply.

We expect to ship review units from the large batch that is arriving shortly.
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