Hi Mark,

I think (but haven't checked), that the bypass outputs are for things like 'tape', headphone amps with DACs or for feeding your main output to another room in your house. They carry your main source, pretty much unaltered.

I think that you can enable the DSP speaker option, and as long as you don't select MHR, it should be standard SPDIF.

The problem you have in both cases is a lack of volume control, though. To maintain SNR, modern Meridian kit doesn't output the volume reduced values over the digital outputs. If you were to plug in DSPs, they would handle volume (in a hybrid analogue/digital fashion). They would receive full scale values over digital.

The only item I can think of that you can plug straight into a DAC is a 518. I believe that there are undocumented (or at least rarely used) modes of the 562 that support it too.

I did use an external DAC for a while (not as good as yours, mind) with a 518, but I found that when I switched to Meridian, the built in DACs were phenomenal. That was a 568.2 as well (although I'm now on a G68).

I guess if you were very keen on using it, you could plug bypass (or the front DSP outputs for multi channel) into it, then send the output to a pre-amp and switch that in for pure stereo. If you were really brave, you could plug a Meridian pre-amp in after the DAC and set it to follow the main system volume. That would 'fully integrate' your DAC. The downside is that you have a longer analogue chain, which may offset any potential gains in your DAC. You may also have volume tracking problems if there are any slight differences in the 1/2db steps with the 568.2 and 501.

I would have grave concerns about your DAC introducing latency or phase effects which might kill the psycho-acoustic cleverness in many of the Meridian DSP modes. Not due to any design faults in the DAC necessarily. It would have been designed for stereo systems. So any latency (such as that produced by a FIFO buffer if it's a really good design) would not matter in stereo, but could cause lots of integration problems in multi-channel.

In summary; if you desperately want to do it, yes you can. Probably.

Cheers,

Mark.

861v8, DSP5200, DSP5200HC, DSP5000mk2, UHD722, MF10, Prime, Prime PSU