Hello all, I am looking for the best configuration to get the best of my current gear and so far I am struggling. I don't have a home cinema amplifier, my setup is primarly used for hi-fi music and only have a stereo analog amplifier (equiped with a built-in dac) for optic and coax input. I only use the analog part, as I connect all my sources (Radio / SACD player / DMP-A8 / Zidoo UHD5000 / UHD blu-ray player) using RCA connectors. I rarely listen to movies on this amplifier while playing over the Zidoo, when I do it is mostly concerts or opera which always have a stereo audio track built-in. I recently tried to watch Empire Strikes Back and My Fair Lady with the atmos audio track from my Zidoo and I noticed the sound is significantly lower in volume and the mix sounds more anemic as if some channels where missing (or very low) when compared to my UHD player, both on the analog output. I strongly suspect that my UHD player does some downmixing of the atmos for a stereo output, but I can't be 100% certain. I have a hdmi splitter from SMSL that allows for splitting the audio from hdmi to an optical output, with bitstream. I wanted to connect the output of my Zidoo to the DMP-A8 to use its DAC, and this is where my head starts to hurt: 1. Connecting the hdmi audio port to the arc input of the A8 produces no sound, both on arc and earc mode. 2. Connecting the coax or optical output to the the related input of the A8 produces a downsampling to 48Khz no matter what is the original sampling of the audio (for instance My Fair Lady has a 96Khz track). I confirmed this by playing audio tracks from the music player of the Zidoo. 3. Connecting the hdmi audio port of the Zidoo to my splitter to the arc input of the A8 produces no sound, both on arc and earc mode. No matter what I chose for hdmi mode on the Zidoo. 4. Connecting the hdmi audio port of the Zidoo to my splitter to the optical output/input of the A8 leads to the Zidoo not decoding the audio from a movie. However, while playing an audio track there is no downsampling. I don't want to buy a home cinema amplifier, mostly because of space management and to be honest I would expect the Zidoo player to decode the and downmix the audio track in configuration 4. Especially since my UHD player does it. Am I missing something ? I also don't understand why configuration 1 and 3 would not work, but I suppose this is due to HDCP. I would be perfectly okay to use the Zidoo analog output if I could fix the lower / mixing issue I noticed.
