I’ve been reading a lot lately about audio issues and the capabilities of different hardware. I’ve been thinking about when I get a blu-ray drive using the analog outputs of the sound card to my receiver when playing back blu-ray. But I wonder about one thing: what happens to the sound in the channels that I don’t have? For example, my receiver is capable of 6.1 input and output, but I am only running 5.0 (I run a passive subwoofer along with my 2 mains). If the track on a movie is 7.1, does the sound in the 2 extra back channels get lost? With SPDIF the receiver mixes those channels with the 2 surrounds, or I assume it does, when you’re setting up your receiver and you tell it how many speakers you have. But with the 6.1 input, the receiver’s depending on the other hardware to do the work. So what I was wondering, should you use a Y-cable on each surround input so that you could connect the extra channels as well? Or would you just end up with a mess of sound and be better off just doing without them?
.
