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?