Originally posted by soundhound:
The phase shift of an analog crossover most certainly isn't a good thing, but it's something that's taken into consideration in speaker designs for instance. If you have satellite speakers with a woofer and tweeter (I'm not talking about the sub here), you almost certainly have a good old analog passive crossover in there. The designer of the speaker takes the phase shifts into consideration in the design of the speaker, to yield the best results. My original point was just that the best tool for the job should be used, be it analog or digital. One factor in including digital filters in preamp/processors etc is that they are *cheap*. Aside from the software design, there is no parts count involved, really. There can still be good and bad implementations of a digital filter; it's up to the skill of the software engineer.