Dax,

The quality of the surround sound coming out of the digital out is mostly a function of the DAC that's doing the decoding. Any old cheesy transport can reliably feed you the bits from the disc (ignoring jitter for the moment).

I've never owned a projector. I wanted to include one in my current system, but I've got 2 small children and the screen/projector is just too much of an attractive nuissance for small kids. My next project is to convert the little studio apt over my garage into "daddy's theater room" so I'm hoping to upgrade to a nice projector at that time. So perhaps I'll have an answer for that question soon. 8-)

Cheers,