Personally, I was hoping that Outlaw would work with D&M to have McIntosh build the 978/998 for Outlaw. It would certainly give them more profit out of their factory than they have been likely to get otherwise. The differentiation could have been a combination of components (e.g. higher quality DAC's, more memory/faster CPU) and functions/features that are in other D&M products (e.g. Networking). I know that Gonk said D&M would have no interest in this, but it made some sense to me.