Absolutely correct Sir Tuttle. Thats a well organized list of suggestions. I'm running short on sleep these days and am probably going about this in a less than optimal way.
A few answers:
1. No. I suppose if I'm gonna buy a few more cables, I may as well try that.
2. Yes
3. Checked that. It seems to only send over one output at a time, but I can switch manually and it works switching between HDMI and analog out.
4. It dosn't have HDMI (picked up as a short term solution)
5. Tried with a movie as well. I don't have any cables handy to connect from the receiver to the display (am using HDMI to sent video directly to the display, which may be another Rats nest).
6. Don't have another device nor easy access to one.
7. I thought about this, but its a special order and may end up as 'good money chasing bad'
8. Could order a sound card, but $100 gets me the next gen AMD2+ mobo
There are a lot of options here with no guarantee of success. Since I didn't buy the receiver new from a local B&M I can't take it anywhere easily to test the inputs.
The simplest option right now seems to be to spend a few $ on pc analog audio cables to connect to the receiver that way. I know it works.
As was mentioned in my last post, this is an interim solution so if I can get it to work for a while, even with less than optimal analog conversion in the PC, thats fine.
At this point, I want to wait 6-8 months for all the newest gen receivers to be released and evaluated by the early adopters so I can figure out what is going to work best for me.
I still need to sort out how best to do audio from flac or similar through a receiver. Once I figure that out, I will know what feature set to look for in a receiver and how much I really need to spend.
I swear that the people that design these things and write the manuals have no clue how they are going to be used. I think Gigabyte and AMD tried hard on this board, and they came really close, but the didn't close the 'last mile' gap.
