Good luck, but don't be That Guy we make fun of over at another forum that ends up making some crazy Rube Goldberg contraption based around some decade-plus year old AVR because they won't upgrade for some reason or another. Technology moves on and AVRs have a useful shelf life around 7-8 years or so before their lack of modern features and performance negatively affects basic functionality with modern peripherals, which is what you're running into.
If it wasn't for the need of 8x ports of automatic HDMI switching, you could easily get new receivers with 7x HDMI inputs all day long, no problem. Standalone automatic HDMI switches with 18 Gbps support are readily available and cheap, but things get expensive at >5 ports. That said, the $300 8x1
ATEN VS0801HB is exactly the HDMI switch a lot of people are looking for right now.
thebigcheese wrote:
Hopefully devices like my PC that can only output LPCM audio would properly detect that it can send a 5.1 signal?
Would be interesting to test as those audio extractors are usually limited to the bandwdith of SPDIF, so you'll likely only get stereo out from the PC unless you can somehow generate something like Dolby Digital Plus on the PC. Only way to extract 8+ channels of LPCM I'm aware of are the ones with dedicated HDMI audio ports like this one:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0755TB82Qthebigcheese wrote:
Is Onkyo really that unreliable now? I've had mine for like 10 years now with no issues. Anecdotal, for sure, but I bought it originally because they were a reputable brand. But if Denons aren't too much more and are a noticeable improvement, I'll look at some of those.
Supposedly the latest (Pioneer-based?) 18Gbps HDMI 2.0b models are reliable, but the pre-merger Onkyo HDMI 1.4 models where a "when, not if..." when it came to them eventually failing. You bought yours before all the fun started.
Just one example of the fun:
https://www.avsforum.com/forum/90-recei ... 018-a.html_rm_ wrote:
It's not just a matter of being "reliable" or not, there are things such as software differences, room EQ (probably should be a thing to value) and "sound signature" that makes a HUGE difference.
Pretty much, yep.