If your amp is tube, why waste tube life on HT? Also, although your pass through set up might work technically, I wouldn't recommend it. I tried HT pass through with Conrad Johnson, I think my center and rears were using Arcam amp at the time, the difference in sound characters between the two amps drove me crazy. What I do now is basically have two systems that share the front L/R but I physically switch the speaker cables at the back of the speaker to what ever system I want to use. You could do this just use the receiver for all your surround duty then switch bac to the Mac for stereo. This isn't a big deal using cables with banana plugs, a quick switch.