We've talked about all this before...
hmm, the only flaw i see in the demo i saw, was 5 hdmi, 6-8/2 should be standard..
We've known we were going to have five HDMI inputs for a long time now. The AV7005 has six, but one is on the front panel - there are only five on the back. I'd be happy to have more, but it's not unreasonable to settle on five.
a bigger in the chassis, support for 9.x/11.x should be standard, lan should standard
A bigger
what in the chassis? It's already roughly the same size as the Model 990, by the looks of it, and that's pretty darn big.
Support for 9.1 pre-outs would be nice, certainly, but at this point the Model 978 is hardly alone in only offering an eight-channel DAC. The AV7005 does the exact same thing. Marantz stuck extra pre-amp outputs on the back, but they can't all be active at once - a move that has the potential to be misleading to consumers who don't dissect the manual enough (or read Outlaw's guide) to figure that out. As a trade-off, their eight-channel DAC is an ESS Sabre chip. Assuming they did a good job of building an analog stage around it, that's fairly awesome. Adding an extra two-channel DAC chip of equal performance (unless you don't mind a disparity in quality for the height channels) would be a not-insignificant change in price. And 11.1 would require having Audyssey DSX (which I haven't seen mentioned as being included) or the new DTS mode that didn't show up until they were well into development.
As for LAN, they explained their reasoning. They are a smaller outfit, and developing all of the services that are expected once you add a network port is a massive undertaking. We'd be waiting until 2013 to get it if they did that, I'll bet. If you want that, buy a Roku or AppleTV or WD box for $100 or so and move on.
more component inputs, s-video inputs double spdif..
They included three component inputs and three composite inputs (one on the front) plus six digital audio inputs. In this day and age of HDMI connections, that's actually a pretty nice offering. As for s-video, it's been fading for a while now, and Outlaw's not the first to drop it from the rear panel of a surround processor. The AV7005 also omits them. Also, they did include one legacy connection that is really rare: MM/MC phono.
power needs to be compliant for 220/240 vac
Considering the fact that they technically only sell to the US (and sometimes to Canada), their sales volume for markets with 240V power is tiny. They've offered 240V on some power supplies, but it's far from standard for their stuff - simple economics, as the payback is probably somewhere between poor and nonexistent to add the extra cost in pursuit of a few extra sales.
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