The deq is £200 isnt it?

No I was discussing what was hypothetically possible - I did say high end sharc chips.

Even a pc would struggle to do all of the really advanced dsp that is possible for dvd-a in real time. Too many latencies and not enough horse power. Peak to sustained computing ratio is appalling for intel - maybe 20% in real life. Plus you need many cycles to do one dsp operation.  Just pick a sharc that gives you the same product price point as the pc you are aiming for and you will likely have an order of magnitude more DSP power for those fancy algorithms. In a similair fashion to PC graphics cards. I suspect the reason people havent done it is they just stick with vanilla DSP so it makes sense to use cheap sharc chips rather than intel, more powerful sharcs arent required. You could always stick a sharc card in a bare bones pc though. One of those cheaps ones for industrial control. I bet that would be a good solution.