Thanks. I suspected that the SMS-1 wouldn't do a thing for avoiding the extra A/D/A conversion, but I thought that I'd ask anyway.
I wasn't going to download the update since it doesn't do what I was looking for, but I'm glad that I did it anyway. The change in SQ for the PLII and PLIIx modes was a nice surprise. I thought I was imagining the improvement until you folks on this forum confirmed it.
Another thing that I noticed was that I had to turn down the gain on my sub amp quite a bit after the update. Did anyone else experience this, or am I finally going off the deep end?