Gonk: Thanks for confirming my understanding.

It would seem that a more honest approach would be to provide digital outputs that could be used for the height or wide channels and advertise as 9.x or 11.x ready (with an outboard DAC and AMP). This of course assumes that the DSP supplied with the unit has the horsepower to do all of the calculations to generate the wide and/or height channel signals (and of course that is another area where manufacturers seem to mislead).