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I gave up on getting audio passthrough to work reliably and just send PCM over HDMI. I don't think there are downsides to this, unless my computer is somehow worse at decoding DTS than my AV receiver?

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Should be just fine, at the minor cost of losing some configuration via your receiver remote, as long as your PC can deliver multichannel PCM to your receiver. Until relatively recently there wasn't a common way to do this, but recent versions of HDMI can.

The main reason that passthrough is the norm is history - the connection to the receiver used to generally be S/PDIF or HDMI 1.x versions that had the same capability as S/PDIF, so you had to use Dolby or DTS to get the audio to the receiver. Otherwise you could only do two channels.

Actually a shocking number of PC motherboards and soundcards of that era have 7.1 worth of analog outputs, but I can't say anyone ever used them. I believe 7.1 analog outputs were required for Intel HD Audio compliance.

The only two things I can think of are Atmos (as mentioned in the article), and metadata for dynamic range compression (which you can do on the computer too but may be more convenient to control on the receiver).

I think the main reason for audio passthrough preference in the home theater crowd is seeing the DD/DTS logos light up on the receiver.

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