Sorry, Hank, I know that you recognize Theta as part of the weirdly esoterically pricey kind of gear that most of us value oriented Outlaw-types scratch our heads over. Even though I do know a few folks with dedicated theater rooms in their custom built homes I cannot say that I have seen the Theta gear outside of showroom / AV convention.

My gut tells me that the "design pre-work" that NAD did include to allow for card swappable video is considerably less involved than the kind of integration points needed to swap-out the cards needed for multiple new channels of object-oriented / immersive sound.

From what I've seen even stand alone equalization devices, from firms like Wisdom, DEQX, or Lyngdorf, have exceedingly small market bases and thus need to cover very high development costs. It still strikes me that as far as the actual "hardware" of these boxes they do not seem be something that would be horribly costly to build well -- typically they do rely on XLR jacks, and of course need to be designed for very "clean" operation, but with the core dsp processors falling in price it seems hard to believe that no one enters the market...