Forest for the trees; the iTech DSP acts as the digital crossover for the M2's, and so there's no conventional passive ditto between the Crown amps and the individual JBL drivers - that's a major benefit in itself. Before speculating any further about the detrimental effect of an A/D to D/A conversion, think about its possible magnitude compared to the influence of a passive crossover in its stead, with all that entails. People tend to focus negatively on a likely extra conversion element where active goes, but one has to consider it in the bigger picture and what it replaces - not as something that is added to an existing, passively configured package. It's one 'or,' and not 'and' the other. Maybe there's no free lunch in either case, be it passive or active, but I'd wager the latter holds the far better potential and actual outcome as the most properly optimized and capably sounding implementation - by a fairly wide margin - and that's incl. an A/D to D/A conversion.
Does the DSP in JBL M2/Crown amp diminish the sound quality?
The Crown iTech amp that comes with M2 has BSS DSP for equalization. While this may give the listener option to change sound quality, I am thinking that the sound quality may diminish because it is taking your analog preamp signal to digital, to EQ and back to analog. This is kind of like taking a digital sound through a DAC and back to a digital sound. What do you think?
Jay
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