"Tanstaafl" on this BBS is doing precisely what you're talking about: Feeding a CD into the aux-in of the empeg and competing in IASCA with it. He is happy with the results, although you have to be a little careful with EQ curves. By default, the empeg doesn't artificially boost the bass frequencies the way most consumer CD players do, so the CD player will tend to sound warmer than the empeg until you've managed to create separate EQ presets for the CD player and the empeg.

As far as the 18k aux-in limit in the specs, I don't know why it says this. If it's true, then it must be a limit of the DSP they're using. Easy enough to test this assumption with the proper CD...

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Tony Fabris