I can say with certainty that Outlaw has never distributed in Australia. There may have been a product or two wind up there over the last eleven years or so, though.

Multi-zone outputs are fairly common. Outlaw's had them on the 950 and 990, and it's likely that the 998 will have them as well. However, multi-zone outputs are stereo rather than multichannel, and they are almost always purely analog - I've described them as stereo analog pre-amps tucked inside the unit. It's less about physical space (if you look at the Model 990, you'll find that it has a healthy amount of space available under the hood) than it is about first cost. Creating a multichannel second zone requires building in costly duplicate surround processing capabilities. Put simply, it means packing two surround processors (two DSP chips, two multichannel DAC sections, two sets of memory, two user interfaces) into one chassis. Nobody does it because the cost would be significant and the number of people who use it would be very small. Folks who want to have multiple surround sound setups simply have to buy a separate surround processor or receiver for each setup. If you wanted to have the exact same audio going to two separate setups, you could use either splitters on the pre-amp outputs or use both the unbalanced and XLR outputs (the 998 is almost certain to have XLR pre-amp outputs) to feed the same signal to two amps and two sets of speakers. I don't recommend it because that is not an optimal approach. One setup is going to have to operate with the other setup's speaker distances, trim settings, EQ, and Trinnov settings. Really, if you want to have multiple surround installations under one roof, each should have its own surround receiver or processor.


For receivers, I agree that many of them (especially at the lower price points) tend to squeeze too much into a small box at the expense of compromises - mostly compromises relating to power amplification. I disagree with this sentiment for surround processors, though. Looking at the dominant surround processors on the market over the last ten years, I've seen nothing in the designs that indicate compromises in performance or feature set based on chassis size. For that matter, surround processors have in general remained the same size or gotten bigger, in spite of the fact that HDMI offers the theoretical potential to reduce the rear panel ports. As I have noted, the Model 990 was already about as large as is practical for most cases (and too big for some people). Making it bigger isn't going to improve anything. Are there some specific surround processor products you have in mind when you talk about "smallest space possible" and "losing features"?


I think a happy medium can be found. In 2005, I think the Model 990 came very close to finding that happy medium (as much as any product can) compared to products near its price point. I think that even when you hit that a happy medium, though, it is not going to satisfy everyone.