I have to admit, I have never been able to fully understand exactly what Direct and Pure Direct modes do on a Denon.
The HK's are really simple -- you can turn the DSP off, but you lose bass management.
The Direct modes on Denon seem to drop out the tone controls but keep the DSP running unless you also turn off the sub. Seems to me, though, that if the bass management is still running (it's the DSP that filters the bass out of your main channels when running the speakers in Small) then you aren't really running what I would call Direct, are you ?
Or is the idea that the mains are getting a full-range signal bypassing the DSP, but the DSP is still running to peel off the LF information and send it to the sub ? If that were the case the sub info would still go through the DSP but your mains would get "pure direct signals"
Any ideas ? When you have the mains set to "small" and run in Pure Direct do you get deep bass out of the mains ? If not, what other than the DSP is... um... de-bassing the signal ?
EDIT - I have read the manual a few more times and am starting to suspect that Pure Direct is only different from Direct when the sub is turned off. The manual for the 2805 says a few times that "the Subwoofer channel must be set to Off in order to disable the digital circuits" or something like that. My guess is that the DSP keeps running as long as the sub is enabled.
Anyways, thread drift... back to getting this guy's sub running
