Ok, so I recently set up my AVR again after we moved a couple of weeks ago. It's an
Onkyo TX-NR609 and I got a screamin' deal on it. I'm only running it in 5.1 right now, but I may at some point run it in 7.1 with front-hi speakers, but I haven't done much research on that yet, probably not worth the energy.
My HTPC is a Zacate based Asus rig linkied
here. I'm connecting the PC to the AVR via HDMI and using the AMD Catalyst drivers for HDMI audio as well as video. I get what appears to be the correct compressed audio properties when I look at the properties of the audio setup.
MC is a little different than WMC in that to get decent surround sound out of WMC I had to keep Windows thinking that it had 2 channels, and then let WMC decode. It was still set up that way when I started using MC and it seemed like I had to set up Windows in 5.1 to get surround in MC.
I'm just wondering what the best way to go about setting everything up is. I've got some DTS-MA and TrueHD BD rips and I just want to make sure that I'm getting the best sound that I can out of my equipment. Right now I'm using the 'Direct' setting on my Onkyo, which I THINK is using the HTPC as the decoder. I don't think I've ever even seen the TrueHD light-up on my AVR, but that might be because the PC is doing the work.
Just looking for some pointers.