No worries here the passthrough/amp feature is at the receiver/pre-amp.
I don't follow you. There needs to be some way to tell the o/s where to send the audio data stream. From what I could learn a few months ago, there was no way to do this with the MA96. The default was for the o/s to pass the audio stream to its decoder and to downsample it to 16 bit. I didn't quite understand audio handling before I bought this board.
Its the only real dissapointment I have had. It upsamples dvds to 1080p very well. Good enough that I never bothered with software upsampling that could be tweeked to improve picture qulaity.
I planned on getting a video card to do HD video formats. With the sound issue, I may end up replacing the mobo.
How good the M69 is depends on what you are doing. If it dosn't involve HD audio or video, I think its a great board.
