Matt,
calibration discs certainly are not the issue - I don't care much if those play correctly as my enjoyment of them is rather limited ;-) They are just used to analyse a given problem. If I hear that something is off during movie watching I take calibration discs to confirm the issue. As happened with the JRSS issues described above (it is rather strange that nobody recognized the wrong/swapped surround channel mixing before). The issue of upmixing the front left and right to all channels during a 5.1 soundtrack is something I noticed during watching an episode of Deadwood. During a scene the soundfield suddenly and radically so changed. The surrounds, which were dead silent in this scene, suddenly were active. The Center channel was also silent during this non-dialog scene. It is a rather weird issue. So I disabled JRSS and the problem was fixed. Then, and only then, I used calibration discs to see what is going on.
It is certainly much more common that movies/TV shows have certain scenes with no activity in the Center and Surround Channels than the special case of said Minneapolis PBS station
If this detection is not made optional (for those important users in Minneapolis ;-) may I suggest that you simply deactivate it based on source type - If source is any DVD, Blu-Ray or file based 5.1 content (other than recorded TV streams) this detection potentially does harm but certainly no good. Thank you!
Another issue with JRSS arised yesterday: I was watching the Criterion Blu-Ray of Kurosawas "High and Low". This Blu-Ray comes with a 4.0 soundtrack. LAV Audio decodes the DTS MA track correctly with Front Left, Front Right, Center and 1 channel Surround Back. Media Center doesn't route this channel matrix correctly. If I select 7.1 as "Channels" it doesn't matter if upmixing is disabled or JRSS is engaged - the Center channel gets mixed to the left surround output.
First I thought that 4.0 for Media Center uses Left/Right Front, Left/Right Surround as I think that's a music format - it would explain routing the Center to the Surround speaker.
But when I select "4.0" in DSP Studio/Output Format/Channels it plays correctly (it doesn't matter if JRSS is enabled or not).
I don't quite understand the "DSP Studio/Output Format/Channels" option. It says that this is the number of channels used for playback. But in cases like my example above it needs to be manually adjusted to the source format - which is hardly user friendly
If I leave it to "Source Format" all 5.1 channel sources are routed wrongly for my 7.1 setup -> Surround channels get mixed to Back Surround due to the channel order of 7.1.
In my opinion the following may be considered much more user friendly: let the user specify his/her physical channel layout with "DSP Studio/Output Format/Channels". When I have 7.1 speakers I select 7.1. Now MC can route any source format to this output channel layout. If additionally I enable JRSS any source format (other than stereo if that option is used) is upmixed to 7.1.
As it is now I have to e.g. choose 4.0 as channel layout (although I have a 7.1 setup) to make use of 4.0 source formats. While I have to set channels to 7.1 in order to play 5.1 streams in the correct channel order. I hope you see that's hardly an intuitive or logical approach.
The good news is that nevcairiel has done a fantastic job with LAV audio of correctly handling all source format/source channel layouts that are out there. MC's "only" job is to route (or upmix) this correctly decoded stream from LAV Audio to the physical speaker layout of the user. Be it Stereo, 5.1 or 7.1 or something more special
Thank you very much for your consideration, Matt.