The design of traditional adaptive systems in signal processing applications has been strongly influenced by the need to provide an efficient implementation. At high bandwidths this has tended to be an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). This, together with the need to make adaptation as reliable as possible has led to the use of as much a-priori knowledge as possible in the design. The result is often a non-optimal design. This paper examines an alternative strategy which removes many of the a-priori constraints and targets an implementation based on a real-time reconfigurable hardware platform.