One DAC to Rule it All

@eddnog That is not a fair comparison. The DEQX Pre 4 is a $10,000 unit. I will have a lot more to say in a week or so as my DEQX Pre 8 will be delivered this Tuesday. 

@koestner Great solution! I had Velodyne subs way back. Eventually the surrounds fell apart. I kept one to use as a Fish Tank stand. I build my own subs now. I am working on Model 4 at this time. They are four balanced force subs with ultra low resonance enclosures using a total of eight 12" drivers. 

The plate amps in most commercial subs are cheap and the integration is awful with those silly low pass filters. Passive subs give you much more flexibility allowing you to use full two way digital crossovers and your choice of amp.

@kraftwerkturbo Excellent! I seems to be hard to convince people that raising the subwoofer crossover point to 80-100 Hz greatly improves the performance of any speaker. Yes , you use subwoofers to improve your lowest end, but 1/2 the advantage is improving the performance of the main speakers. It requires a full 2 way crossover with time alignment and slopes in the 6 to 8th order range. 

My system isn't as high end as some but I use an analog crossover between the pre and amp for the subs.  Works well with no discernable degradation.  

@emsher22 i do the same thing in my system between my preamp and power amp; I just use a solution that has balanced inputs and outputs, the DBX 223sx.

-Ed

Lyngdorf makes a good processor that is in one box. Of course active crossovers are best but doing all the processing under one brain makes the most sense. There is no way to get the latency correct if you use a stereo , multi sub and surround system in one room.