I thought about the reciever board approach, but seem to put so much other crap on their boards that I didn't want to mess with (simulating this, enhancing that). It would more difficult to reverse engineer a receiver than to start over.The standard line from the guys at Audio Concepts here in Dallas is that the standalone processors are more expensive because of the high quality of components. That's probably true to a point, but I suspect most of the additional cost is due to licensing fees that are easy to offset in the high volume world of receivers, rather than the relatively low vaolume world of seperates.