Apart from the parametric EQ stuff, all the docs are available - someone even managed to get the 7705 programmers manual as a softcopy, which is something that empeg never managed to prise out of Philips. I could well believe that official sanction to get the parametric eq programming code wouldn't be a lot of hassle.

Leaning heavily on open source stuff would make things progress faster; using some existing client/server code (and just running both on there) would be pretty nice too. This way you'd also decouple the part which needs to keep the disks spun down from the whole UI section which might be useful for debugging too. Looking at how far people got with new code for the Rio Receiver, which was a far, far more resource-limited platform, in a relatively short time, it doesn't seem to be an unattainable goal to get something going which could be built on.

Hugo