Jeff,
You are absolutely right that messing with the 990 could be a bad idea. It wouldn't do my warranty any good either.

My concern is that I am asking the equalizer to cover a very wide dynamic range by asking it to handle the range of the source material plus the range of the volume control. The equalizer is 24 bit, which is about as good as it gets. I just think that the chance of introducing artifacts would be decreased when doing an analog/digital/analog transformation if I was only dealing with the dynamic range of the source material.

I haven't even hooked up the equalizers yet, so maybe the best thing to do is just listen. I do tend to get too wrapped up in theory.

Thanks to you and Gonk for your valued input.