Sorry to disagree with you genaxia
but I think as Stu clearly pointed out , you cannot be really familiar with the internal workings of the empeg, over time technology has moved on from the quality possible by the output stage of the integrated on boeard phillips dsp DAC.
( fantastic in its time by the way respect to the Guys )

The Alpine H700 DAC is more or less external anyway ( in a hidaway box ) and the headunit is just a display and controller for the actual audio circuitry that can be mounted right next to the amps. Untill somone impliments "brute fir" and "jack" on a car platform with sufficient processing capability to generate enough digital outputs to feed to independent digital amps the alpine is more or less as close to as good as it gets right now.

Ideally the technology in the new TI class D amps like the tas5015 will make its way to the car audio market and will allow compact extreme quality amps relatively cheaply, remember Ti now own burr-brown and recently bought toccata ( the technology behind the 10k$ Tact millenium, one of the worlds best poweramps )
http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/productfolder.jhtml?genericPartNumber=TAS5015

But this is not with us yet and no one gives us enough digital outs (some of us are always awaiting new technology as much as a beta 3 release ) but a major benefit here is the possibility of improving the weakest links in an audio system, usually the passive filter network in the speakers and the enviromental compexities of a car enviroment, If you hear a real active digital xover enviroment correction system with FIR rather than IIR filters in the time domain i think you would be a little less dismissive of where the alpine going. Check out "RMC" on AVS forums

The item I thought some people might benefit from allows a short run of 4v line level signal cable to your amps that feed each drive unit directly without any x or c in the way this significantly improves the contol the amp can exert over the drive unit and therfore the systems response.

I'm sorry if this doesn't do it for you and you prefer to run direct from the integrated dac in the onboeard DSP chip via some op-amps, analog circuitry, phono cables, amps, speaker cables, passive filters and then finally into your drive units then fine thats your choice but I think that a lot of people on this board have spent a lot of care and attention on their in car HI Fi systems ( not many middle of the roaders have even heard of EMPEG let alone understand it or own one ) not to mention cash ( empeg alone was origionally close to 1000 US ) and therfore may want to optimise their systems as much as possible to benefit from this incredible technology ( also significantly improved capability by Maczrule's Dig out upgrade --Respect where its due ) , to those people ( who may look at focal, phase linear etc drive units and xtant or similar amps ) I dont think $600 is a lot of money.

Especially when you consider that an Alpine H700 ( based on the F1 tech ) and Empeg with .wav or ideally .flac ( beta 3 )output could then compete or better many Extreme High end ODR,EFX,XES pioneer P9 or so called reference "denon z1" & mcintosh systems etc at a fraction of the price.

All I am trying to do is point out an option for people who do care and think about these things, and hopefully help out some users on this board.....