I've been watching this to see if someone who actually knew what they were talking about replied, Kelly... They haven't, obviously, so proving my ignorance once again.... ;?P

I've read different reports, that HDMI sends the decoded signal & HDMI sends the exact stream. A short test DVD using Sony-encoded ac3 authored with the free version of Muxman is about as simple as you can make a DVD IMHO. Compared with another test DVD authored the same way but using a snippet of commercial ac3 should determine if the Sony ac3 is the problem or not. And if the Sony audio - Muxman test worked, that would point to something about the DVDA DVD structure, wouldn't it? If neither worked, then I'd wonder if DRM wasn't coming into play? It'd be pretty hard to verify otherwise, since we can't even look at the actual structure on many (most?) of them because of the copy protection... The only place I can think of that may provide some info would be to see if the author of DVDFab Decrypter would know.