Digital crossovers?

These are good up to a certain level. Once you get beyond a certain price point the built-in DAC's in these units are not as good as aftermarket DAC's. The other disadvantage is that these are PCM only, so no DVD-A or SACD. Also, if you want to use an analog source, you will have to run the signal through an ADC.

The advantage is the very steep crossover slopes you can achieve - up to 300dB/octave with no phase issues. Such steep slopes are unheard of in the analog crossover world ... well not without major problems.

You can also correct room anomalies digitally. This works by finding the null point in your room and subtracting all other frequencies to match the null point. In some cases you may find that you do not have enough gain, but I have been told that on some units it is possible to modify the op-amps in the output stage of the DAC to provide higher output if necessary.

I've been bi-amping with a TacT RCS2.2X for 3 years. The previous format was a Placette passive Linestage and a modded Dahlquist DQ-LP1, which combo proved extremely transparent. What very slight loss of transparency was experienced has been more than compensated for by the ability to make room/speaker/woofer corrections in the time domain, choose a 60db/oct slope w/o phase shift, and smooth my low end frequency response(in the room) to with +/- 2db from 20 to 250hz. No losses whatever in sound staging, imaging, immediacy, or timbre, but rather a much greater sense of being present in the recording venue. Some of which I have(as a reference).

I've heard great things about the Salk Sound HT-3 - but I've never heard them myself. I'd love to get some feedback from someone who has.

Marty.

I wish I could remember who it was but about 2 years ago at RMAF there was a guy that was demonstrating an open baffle 3 way kind of home brew loudspeaker. Well--sort of. What he was really demonstrating was a computer based digital crossover and eq system. He had relatively inexpensive amps and these reasonably priced drivers and then basically just crossed them over and did correction for the space he was in (completely untreated too). He was playing files off i-tunes and I thought he had a really nice demonstration. This was not high end, more high achievement for really pretty inexpensive components and I thought a really cool demonstration of what can be done digitally. If anyone knows who he was or his company name--please add it to this thread.