Bose 901 Active EQ Loop
There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that a multichannel receiver with Bose 901's will only sound right in STEREO on stereo analog material. For one thing, the other speakers around the room are not designed to recieve its Active Equalization and for another, if you engage your Tape Monitor you will not be able to play digital sources. Tape Monitor is for analog stereo material only and on my receiver it disables any digital inputs.
The good news. I have a setup similar to what I think you're trying to do and it works great!
A separate stereo amp for the 901's was my solution. I run a Carver AV-406 (5-channel amp) for my 901's in Front, 2 Subwoofers and the Rear Surround channel, with the Active EQ between the receiver Front L&R Outputs and the 901's amp channels. My receiver controls everything and just drives the Center and Surround speakers. You could get by with just a stereo amp for the 901's. A Carver M-200 is a good efficient amplifier that would have you cooking just fine (2x100W).
Run the dbx and BSR in tandem with each through the tape monitor loop on the receiver but be advised you can only use them on analog source stero material. However, you can still employ the various DSP options to spread the sound around the room.
At my PC workstation across the room I have a stack of analog processors and sources including dbx 3bx-ds, dbx 120x-ds, BSR Spatial Enhancer, BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer, SS-525x EQ, Carver C-9, dbx-224x, JVC cassette deck, Dual 1249 Turntable running through a Garrard MRM-101 Preamp, Pioneer PDR-509 CD Recorder and the Media Center PC stereo analog channels all running through a dbx 400x Program Route Selector (a godsend) which is attached to my ONE TAPE MONITOR on my Pioneer VSX-36TX Receiver. Of course, I have some of my analog processors running in tandem, too, since the 224x only has three processor and three tape loops.
For listening/recording anything 2-channel analog I engage the stack through the Tape Monitor. For everything else I turn the Tape Monitor off. The nice thing about the stack being separate is that I can doodle with recording and use headphones while the TV/DVD/Blu-Ray do something else.
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