Koyaan I see your point but I still find the strategy odd. I do follow this forum daily and anyone can easily sense the frustration and impatience with not having a more advanced prepro but selling your competitors product doesn't solve the problem. Most Outlaw customers who want the 997 want it because it's an Outlaw product which includes all benefits that go along with that. There is a difference between selling the Onkyo 886 and selling the SMS-1, they don't offer a competing product to the SMS so adding it to their product line seems like a better fit. I liken Outlaw selling the 886 to Emotiva selling the 990 just to appease some of their customers.

Reading Outlaw's own words describe why this doesn't fit their business model, especially the second paragragh:

About Outlaw Audio

Outlaw Audio is a completely different kind of consumer electronics company. Our high performance products are available to you exclusively on the Internet. The only place you can evaluate our products is in your own home, where it counts the most.

While there are other Internet retailers that sell consumer electronics products, most of them are merely reselling the same merchandise that is commonly available through traditional sales channels. By contrast, Outlaw designs and manufactures its own brand of high performance audio/video components. The advantage of this approach is obvious. By offering these products directly to you via the Internet, we can eliminate the additional markup required to support a traditional "bricks and mortar" retail store. As a result of this new approach, an Outlaw designed component offers you substantially more performance for a much lower price than any competing product.