I was wondering if additional processing power resulted in an enhancement in sound quality; but perhaps I was off there when I posted that. I guess the extra processsing power lays the foundation and the potential for being able to build in more features and do more things which can improve sound quality, but it and of itself doesnt??
While a more powerful DSP ought not to make any difference to simple operations like decoding Dolby Digital, in practice it often does, not so much because the DSP is more powerful, but simply because it is newer and better supported. The software for things like decoding DD is almost never written by the manufacturers of the final device. Instead it uses standard libraries published by the manufacturers of the DSP. Older DSPs often have more bugs in the standard code libraries, which can't be fixed because the DSP is no supported by the manufacturer. Newer DSPs tend to have less buggy libraries (and if anything is wrong, there's a chance it can be fixed).
So far as I'm aware, Bryston doesn't write its own proprietary post-processing software in the way that (say) Lexicon or Meridian or Tag McLaren all do, so the same thing probably applies to things like bass management. Doing bass management properly is not
quite as simple as it sounds, anyway, and it tends to be an area where older devices (such as the single-processor Tag McLaren AV32R) are a little weaker than newer ones (such as Meridian or Lexicon devices).
My own experience suggests that newer devices with more powerful DSPs seem to produce better quality steering across the rear channels than older ones do. If you compare an SP1.7 to a dual-SHARC Tag McLaren processor, for example, the Bryston sounds better in the front 3 speakers, but the Tag has razor-sharp steering to the rear, while the SP1.7 is slightly less clear. That's also the area where the Lexicon MC12B most clearly beats the SP1.7.
It'll be interesting to see how much (if any) difference there is to the sound quality after the DSP upgrade. There may also be some useful new features. I think it's more or less official that we'll have the ability to set different cross-over frequencies for different speakers with the new DSP - that will allow some useful fine-tuning in floorstander systems where the fronts can go deeper than the rears. It will also (I imagine) eliminate the annoying effect where everything above the cross-over frequency in the LFE channel is rolled off at 24dB per octave.
We'll see.
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