[harsh]

Sorry - should have had more details. My receiver is set up to decode 5.1 channels. On my old H20 - the DD audio worked fine. I made no changes to my set up other than change out the DirecTV box to the HR20. Make sense?

Does your AV receiver tell you what DD mode it is in?

My usual guess in situations like this is that the satellite receiver isn't set to put out the right kind of signal. I would suspicion that it is set to PCM instead of DD.

 

[harsh]

I can't imagine any way that the HR20 could be influencing the multiplexing of the channels. If it were mangling the signal at all, it would be noise.

As for having to use the TV speakers, can you choose basic stereo mode on your AV receiver?

How do you know you are getting rear channel through the fronts? In a 5.1 system, much of the sound should be coming from the center channel.

Another observation that I would offer is that while some programming is embedded with a DD 5.1 signal, all the channels aren't always there.