Digital in, analog out?

I'm trying to hook some headphones up to my 950, but I must be doing something wrong.

I've connected the headphone amp up to the tape out. This works just fine when I use an analog input, but when I switch to a digital input like my dvd player or Xbox, it doesn't look like the d-to-a conversion makes it to the tape out.

I am doing something wrong? Is my 950 broken?

Any help much appreciated.

Been posted before, but...

Analog in, analog out. Digital in, digital (but not analog) out. You could connect up analog RCA cables for the digital sources, and that would obviously work.

The 950 works this way, and actually so did my previous Sony pre/pro.

I hope at some point in the near future the manufacturers fix this sort of thing. It seems like a fairly basic thing and not at all unreasonable to expect. IIRC there are a few who already do, but I'm pretty sure the 950 has company on this one.

Is this purposefully done to frustrate piracy or something? Or does it really significantly add to the cost of the unit to allow for this?

By the way, I did search for this topic before posting, but I wasn't sure what key words to search for. "digital input analog output" didn't help much.

Thanks for the info.

To be honest, I always wondered about this myself. Maybe some copyright/legalese stuff there.

In a way, I like it, but for a completely different reason. Let's say I'm running an lp signal into the 950, but recording it back out through the tape outputs. (I'd rather use the A-to-D converters in my DAT deck for example.) Because we know the 950 doesn't output anything through the digital rec outputs, we can be reasonably certain the 950 isn't throwing in an extra (and unwanted! ) A-to-D and D-to-A conversion before the signal gets to the tape outs.