I thought one of the advantages of the Storm platform is modularity?
Al
Exactly and that's my primary concern here. If Storm is chosen as the product to re-brand the main selling points of Storm is as you mention modularity and the other big one is upgradability. So if Bryston is potentially deviating from that then what was the point of going with Storm in the 1st place. Bryston would have been better off rebranding a receiver, not a modern SSP. If Bryston had of just offered a modern receiver with ATMOS, Dirac, dts:X, etc. I wouldn't be having this discussion because the expected norm for such a product is no upgradeability and if you are lucky you may get an occasional firmware update but that's not what they went with, they went with a state of the art DSP based SSP who is continually updating their units in both hardware and firmware and show no signs of letting up.
To address gbaby and CanadianMaestro, being critical is being realistic, only a fanboy would find no fault in any product or decision the company is making. I've made no bones about it I would prefer to get a Trinnov but here in Canada even the Altitude16 is mid $20k according to my dealer not to mention the even more crazy price of the Atl32 even in 8-8 configuration so those products are completely out of my price range. Other products are Theta but again, those units when equipped with their good DAC's are also ridiculously expensive. So the obvious realistic choice becomes the Storm items, be that Storm's own, the Bryston and Focal.
Being a Bryston owner for many years of numerous amps plus the BDP-2 I would prefer to get the Storm under the Bryston umbrella since I have no actual Storm dealer in province and having a local dealer goes a a long way if a unit runs into issues after purchase. So again to CanadianMaestro, not that it makes any difference, I am an owner and have been for going on 15 years.