In this paper we present a rapid-prototyping environment forfunctional verification and test of digital signal processing algorithms. The environment consists of a virrex-11 device on a PCI-card and an appropriate generic software backend which is used to pre-and post-process the data and to transfer it to the FPGA and pull the resultsfram it. It is designed to meet real-time requirements by means of interleaving block-transfers to andfrom a large on-board memory. We use the system for the development and test of audio signal processing applications. The implemenration and test of the gammatone-resynthesis algorithm is described as an exemplar) algorithm that has been tested within the environment. The presented system is part of a sofware framework for rapid development of power optimized audio signal processing applications on behavioral level using library elements.