Sorry, but that doesn't do it for me.

The empeg already has 4V preouts from Burr-Brown DACs.
The empeg has 20 bands of parametric eq, vs the 17 of the Alpine, with more flexible Q parameterisation.
I don't really care for 31 bands of graphical eq - if you can't do it with the parametric eq, then the speakers/crossover/amp combination just isn't working in the car to begin with.
The empeg already does L/R time alignment.

Ideally this would be used with the empeg digital output to eliminate any souce based noise pickup

How?

empeg ---D---> Alpine ---A---> amp
vs
empeg ---A---> amp

Both have the same number of analogue stages, so your supposition is based upon the Alpines outputs being significantly better than the empegs, which they are not. In addition, since the analog run is then typically long, the potential for noise pick up thus marginalises any differences between the two anyway.

What I would like to see is an amp, (or boot mountable DAC processor) that could eliminate that long run. That would be significant.


This Alpine HU could be useful for anyone adding a DVD player to their system, since it's multichannel features (separate center channel, 8 channel time alignment etc) would then be very useful. But $600 doesn't qualify as a steal otherwise. (IMO)