Hello everyone,
Firstly since this is my first post I would like to thank everyone on here for the valuable information that I have gathered over the past few weeks. A very helpful crowd here. I am a newbie on somewhat of a tight budget and here is what I have come up with for the setup I am planning to get. Opinions are welcome of course.

TV: Panasonic Viera TH-42PX80U 42-Inch 720p Plasma
HTIB: Onkyo HT-S5100 7.1
DVD Player: OPPO DV-980H

I am however wondering if when I hook up the Oppo to the receiver via HDMI (video only) if I should use all 8 analog coax outputs or just a single Toslink cable? I have heard this still will not be TRUE 7.1, correct? Any advantages or disadvantages? Thanks so much to everyone and please let me know what you think of this set up....also consider its for me a college student on a somewhat tight budget.

-Antonio

Video DVDs won't have true 7.1 soundtracks no matter what connections you use. That's the realm of Blu-Ray.

If you plan on playing stuff like DVD-Audio or SACD, use the analog outs. Otherwise, optical should serve just fine.

May I ask what the advantage is of using the analog outputs? Thanks.

Together they have more bandwidth, which you need for stuff like DVD-Audio or SACD (or Dolby TrueHD/DTS if a Blu-Ray player is involved.)

DVD video doesn't need that much bandwidth.

Together they have more bandwidth, which you need for stuff like DVD-Audio or SACD (or Dolby TrueHD/DTS if a Blu-Ray player is involved.)

DVD video doesn't need that much bandwidth.

Hello,
this is interesting to me. I just bought the Oppo for SACD's connecting to an Onkyo TX-NR905. Would you still use RCA out instead of HDMI for better sound?

If you are planning on using the Reon processing of the Onkyo TX-NR905, then you may want to use the analog outputs for SACD and DVD-Audio. The reason for this is that the HDMI bandwidth at 480i is not enough to pass multi-channel DVD-Audio and SACD.

So if you were to use the HDMI for audio and video, you would need to manually change the resolution to 720p or higher for DVD-Audio and SACD playback, then change the resolution back to 480i for DVD-Video playback.