I had a couple weeks there where nothing was working, and then suddenly everything just kind of started falling into place. I thought I had no reason to use the analog outputs anymore, but I'm really glad the Quads wouldn't work out of the HDMI, cuz otherwise I may have never known how good the analogs sound. I don't know if the DACs on my sound card are that much better than the ones on my receiver or if it's more a matter of mangled sound vs. It worked perfectly, and I have since realized that it sounds WAY better out of the analog outputs, and I now use them to play all of my surround sound music (except DTS cds - for that I have to use the SPDIF). I had problems playing the stuff I found that was converted from Quadrophonic LPs to MLP through the HDMI cable, and this prompted me to try the analog outputs on my sound card.

If anyone has any hints or suggestions about playing bit perfect sound through HDMI (if it's even possible on XP, I think maybe you have to have WASAPI which only works in Vista/7), that'd be great, cuz I can't seem to figure it out. I don't know why it wouldn't work at 24 bit. 16 bit worked fine, but this means the sound is being resampled, which is no good. If I used kernel streaming through the HDMI cable, Foobar wouldn't work when set to 24 bit output. I got the HDMI audio drivers working for my ATI video card, and got the DVD Audio MLP files playing properly through Foobar, which made me super happy. The bit of research I've done seems to suggest that you can use these drivers to get bit perfect sound via the digital or analog outputs. I guess I thought I had read that somewhere.

I guess I was mistaken in thinking that ASIO/kernel streaming drivers for bypassing the Windows Kernel Mixer were for SPDIF outputs only, and couldn't be used for the analog outputs. Hey I posted here a few months ago asking some questions, pretty much all of which I have since found the answers to, so I figured I'd share what I figured out.

Foo input dvda