Someone should call Onkyo and tell them they're doing it wrong selling 3 to 5 different levels of each product class. Or maybe they're doing it right since the only thing that they actually have to change is the name plate, because obviously the insides are the same on all of them.

I haven't seen an AVR with balanced pre-outs. I won't buy a pre-pro without them.

A factory in China will produce the same quality product produced in a factory anywhere else on earth so long as the people responsible for payment manage the process to their own standards. Dell and Apple computers are made in China and they're worlds apart in component and construction quality. An AVR and Pre-Pros being made in China don't have to have anything at all to do with each other, even if they're produced in the same factory.

Onkyo isn't crap and any dig I made was only to imply it's a largely mass-market brand producing mass-market goods. A small shop like Outlaw can easily specify better components for their smaller production runs.

If Outlaw was building a clone of a mainstream AVR without the amps, I'm pretty confident we'd have seen the 978 out a few years ago. That's not something terribly difficult to have a factory turn around.