Well, I got my hands on the Onkyo Pro 885 (virtually the same as the Integra). Now my veteran Outlaw 950 can go upstairs into my music only system to do 5.1 analog duty with my SACD player,

Anyway, the Onkyo and Integra are both still nearly impossible to obtain, so if Outlaw can get a comparable priced/performing unit out by early spring, I think they will be in good shape..

Gonk, the PS3 chip's bitstream output capability (or lack therefo) has never been officially confirmed. It was an early version of the chip made specially for Sony, and the mfr has not stated definiteively whether it can bitstream or not. Evidence points to no, but there's still a faint hope it can.

I will say, the PS3 is now a really stunningly good CD player and SACD player. They have added a 3rd bit shaping algorithm to its upsampling and it makes stuff sound just amazing.

One point where Outlaw could outshine the Onkyo/Integra IMO is the internal video processing. They chose to not allow it vary by input, which makes it somewhat unusable in a high end system I feel. I have 3 video sources in my system, A dish Network SD tuner/DVR, the PS3 and an Oppo 971. The Reon is unneeded on the latter two, but even still I may have left it engaged most of the time to clean up the crappy satellite picture, but if I set it to scale for my TV (720p), it stretches a 4:3 image to 16:9, and my TV's HDMI input does not have "squish" aspect ratio controls, only zoom and crop. So I am left with only being able to use it as a deinterlacer.

Also they hobbled the options on the thing until customer clamor got a firmware upgrade. But it still only has one set of settings and is an all or nothing deal..

So if Outlaw gave a good solid set of controls over the Reon or one of the competing chips and let you configure it per input, they would probably be in good shape to compete with the Onkyo eevn at a similar price.

BB