[Pvt_Ryan]

My TV has optical out.

Say I want to have the audio from my HTPC go over HDMI to the TV and then have the Audio go from the TV optical out to the AMP will I lose anything?

[dondre]

First question is still... What's the point of this re-routing?

I personally send the audio signal from my SB X-Fi (through SPDIF) to my decoder (Z-5500) and it works great,

Sending the audio signal through HDMI to your TV creates more headaches because you have to use either ATI's built in Audio chip for this either nVidia's way of routing the audio signal,

If it's only for DD/DTS/AAC (up to 7.1) audio tracks I'd stick to sending the audio signal directly to your decoder,

And to answer your question, I (personally) think that will not alter the signal whatsoever if you re-route it through your TV,

e.g. what could change the audio quality will be using the DSP of a dedicated audio card for the decoding instead of your decoder itself

hope that helps you a bit

PS; re-routing the audio through your TV could be a good idea for HD audio contents (like DTSHDMA or DTRUEHD) because the SPDIF doesn't simply have enough bandwidth and you'd have to use cinch cabling

[Pvt_Ryan]

I currently have XBox 360, PS3, Sky+HD & HTPC all connected to my TV via HDMI they all connect (bar the ps3, due to lack of connection) to a "3 to 1" manual optical switch, which then connects to my DVDPlayer/Amp.

If I tell all of them to use HDMI for the audio and then tell the TV to use optical for it's audio then I can remove the manual switch and the excess cabling.

I just wanted to make sure using the TV as a hub wouldn't cause problems.

I am not even sure if the HTPC will be able to do this, it's MC2 in my sig, I just want to make sure it's not going to be a waste of time before I try.

[bmentink]

Don't use audio over HDMI if you want good HiFi quality, rather use the SPDIF optical/coax port .... digital audio over HDMI was the worse thing they could have done to screw up digital audio!!

Clock jitter is the problem:

"When Len Wallis (award winning owner of the Len Wallis super HIFI store in Aus) was asked by AUS HIFI Dec 2008 "biggest industry disaster"? he responded "HDMI..without any shadow of a doubt" ... so there you go!!"

[CrystalP]

Pvt_Ryan, you can easily get multichannel hdmi to your TV, but what the receiver will see through the optical connection depends on your TV brand/model. Most forward two channels (that's the limit of optical anyway) but only some can passthrough the compressed formats (AC3, DTS).