One note on PCs and Surround Sound, and this is only really important if you are a PC Gamer...
Case1) while most current Motherboards will do 5.1 or 7.1 Audio, some will only present it in Analog and you will need a 3.5mm jack for each audio port. You've all seen the array of 6 multicolored "headphone" jacks on the back of PCs...
Case2) If your motherboard is recent it may have Dolby Studio on it you will likely have an SPIDF port on the back, whether optical or coax. These boards will talk Dolby Digital to your Receiver if the source is in Dolby Digital.
In Case1, you can passthrough your Audio to an HDMI port if your VideoCard has one. In this case, if you don't have a Dolby encoder on board you *will* get audio through your HDMI but it will only be Stereo.
In Case1, you can passthrough your Audio to an HDMI port if your VideoCard has one. In this case, if you *do* have a Dolby encoder on board you *will* get audio through your HDMI and it will be presented in Dolby Surround, if your Source is (IE movies)
In Case2 you certainly have a Dolby Encoder on board and your only choices are do you want to use the SPIDF connector or pass through to your HDMI.
In *all* cases above if the source is not Dolby Digital encoded you will get an analog presentation and it will be downmixed to Stereo. For example most Video Games.
Only way arround this is if you have a sound card or an onboard chip that supports DDL or "Dolby Digital Live". DDL will encode multi-channel analog audio into Dolby Digital in Real Time.
My Motherboard is an MSI P67-GD65 with Dolby TruStudio Pro but in order to game in Surround Sound I bought and ASUS Xonar D1 soundcard with DDL and an Optical Out. It should be noted that some games do DolbyDigital encoding now anyway (Battlefield Bad Company 2) and will not require the additional soundcard if you have the Dolby motherboard.
You have no idea HOW long it took me to figure all this out!
snazzed
