Receiver Vs. PC

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I *think* it may be possible to do this, although I haven't tried it. There's a whole forum devoted to this product, along with a lot of very smart peopleand engineers; you might inquire there:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/

This thread in particular addresses such issues:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...hlight=icecast

Looks like it takes a little work though.

Thanks, although I really doubt that that soultion would support surround. I'll check it out some more though.
It probably also introduces some lagg to the audio, doesn't matter in most cases perhaps but in movies it really is noticable

But I haven't looked into it deeply yet so I'll do that just in case.

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It sound's like you're looking for a soundcard that would basically do all the things your Yamaha already does. If you output digitally to the receiver then you don't need to spend a fortune on a soundcard. In the price range your suggesting, I don't think you'll be able to beat the processing in the Yamaha. Plus Yamaha has some of the better DSP modes for home theater.

I'm not sure if you are looking for 5.1 audio from a WMA output. You said the incompatability with the receiver was with WMA. Something doesn't make sense to me here. In my mind, for 2 channel audio, the software on your computer should be converting the WMA file to PCM and the PCM stream is what is digitally sent to the Yamaha (which handles PCM just fine). There should be no incompatability.

For movies, if you're playing DVD's on the laptop, your sound card will need to support and output digitally the appropriate format DD, DTS (SACD can not be digitally transmitted between components, copy protection). But that should not be hard to find. The receiver can handle those as well. The expense in a card is the D/A conversion, go digital out and you won't have to worry about it. I don't think you can do much more in the price you suggest, and I don't think you need to either.

The Yamaha is good. I really doubt you'd be dissapointed for movies or 2 channel. If you find your music listening is really critical then think about an external DAC. But get it up and running and take your time to decide.

The problem isn't WMA it is in WMP (windows media player) and outputting digitally certainly serves my purposes theoretically (and cheap too, you can get an external digital card for less than $50).

For music I only need stereo, especially since the rear-speakers aren't that good in comparison. But for movies surround would be good.

The problem is withing Media Center which uses Windows Media Player for playback. It's really tricky to bybass the windows kmixer (which spoils the bit-perfect digital signal and resamples it which of course comes with degrading of the audio).

I'd just loooove to just connect the receiver from the internal soundcards SPDIF output and just walk away. But the quality is really poor because that card can't produce a bit-perfect digital signal but it is degraded alot in the process.

The few cards that normally can achieve this though are simple external cards (that often can't do anything but outputting SPDIF, perfect for my purposes really) that bybass the kmixer automatically. Unfortnuately those can't distinguish between stereo and surround and you would have to go in the Control Panel and change it manually (not really an option).
My solution to that problem would be to perhaps get 2 external cards. One for stereo and one for surround although I don't know if that would work the way I want it to.
Another (but quite small in comparison) problem is that TV can't be outputted digitally. But I don't think that quality is that important when it comes to TV so I could just use the internal card or some old SB Live! Value card I have around.

If that would work I would probably do that but the downside is that perhaps not everything will be able to be outputted digitally and that would mean a serious drop in quality. However if music and movies works I think I would just ignore that.
But it is a lot of work and research behind getting it to work (also those cards aren't that easily found in sweden that you find on the internet-forums) and I have been looking for a solution like that for months without getting anywhere.
So I'm getting quite tired of it and thought that if an analogue card can fix this with equal or better quality it would be worth the hassle to trying to get that working (basically the WAF has a high priority and I'm not going to be around a lot in the future so it has be completely managed by the rest of the family ),