With resources being limited across the high end industry, I wonder why everyone is striving to produce a do-everything pre-pro.
The idea of a component system is to be able to marry "best of breed", specific purpose modules togeather to produce the desired result without a lot of duplication and replace them individually without scrapping the whole works.
It would be difficult to put togeather a system today that didn't have video processing capabilities in at least 3 of the components ( source, pre-pro and TV).The same is becomming true of audio processing as players like the Oppo BDP-83SE do a bang-up job with D/A conversion in all formats.
The inclusion of redundant capabilities merly makes each device more complicated , expensive to purchases , and difficult to intergrate.
I will conceed that the attraction of single-wire HDMI hook-up is a selling point, but I for one don't see it as all that necessary.
As near as I can tell, the only thing that the 997 will do that an OPPO BDP mated with a 990 won't is equalization.
I'd love to see a stand alone full capability equalizer ( kind of a full range SMS) offered
. This would make more sense to me than a full capability pre-pro that's continually on the verge of obsolesence.