Thanks everyone for there help so far. (and I don't even have my speakers yet) I was reading in the manual that you specify a default surround mode for the digital input. So if I have an optical output from my dvd player going into the optical 1 input on the 990 and I set the default as dolby digital then that's the default surround mode. What happens when I put in a cd and I only want to hear it two channel (along with the sub of course)? I know I can hook up separate L R audio cables but that bypasses the 990 DAC. Does the 990 just detect that this is a cd and only play back two channels? Can I tell it what to do with CD's?

you can set the default for nearly an sound you want to get.

IF you set your DVD input default to DD, but the program isn't in DD, it will default to DPLII(x) The 990 will detect it if it's DTS too automatically.

If you want to hear your music in just the Left and Right stereo channels.. you can set the input selection to stereo or bypass or upsample.

Are you using your DVD player to play CD's too? In that case you may need to run two audio lines from your DVD player. 1 digital(optical) for 5.1 sounds and a L&R RCA for stereo playback. I'm not exactly sure there though. And might have to use to seperate inputs.. say DVD for your movies and CD input for using the RCA's for CD's

Here's what I do - I use one player for both DVD and CD, but I have two inputs set up to use that digital input (in other words, optical 1 is assigned to both the DVD and CD inputs). On the DVD input, I always use surround processing, but on the CD input I have it set to upsample.

good idea.. i guess i'm a purist and love having seperate components for DVD's and CD's.

I have found that some DVD players sound compressed when playing CD's. Namely i've found those from Toshiba to sound that way.

I enjoy doing A-B compairisons. If anyone has a DVD player and a CD player hooked up to your system. It might be cool to do some critical listening on both playes with a CD and see which sounds better. It's a fun way to spend a afternoon with your system.

another double post deleted.

double post erased this one.

I'm confused. If you have two inputs set to use optical 1 how does the 990 know which one to use? How does the 990 know whether you want to use the DVD side or the cd side?

All you have to do is push "CD" or "DVD" on the remote - the CD input will always be in stereo for two-channel music listening, and the DVD input will always apply surround processing. The two are completely independent, and don't care in the least that they are using the same digital input connection.