Goose said that:

"The digital signal for sound is still fed to the receiver."

Do you mean that the digital signal is fed to the receiver via the HDMI cable, or via the separate digital audio cable (either coax or optical)? (Or perhaps via several analog PCM RCA cables?)

In other words, can you pass compressed digital audio via the HDMI cable and the receiver will decode it? If so, then does the receiver decompress the high-def audio formats on high-def DVDs?

Can someone explain to me what is the point of "HDMI pass-through"? Under what circumstances would I want use an HDMI cable to plug my HDDVD player to the a/v receiver, and route another HDMI cable back to the TV? I currently plug the HDMI cable from my HDDVD player directly into the TV, and plug a separate (digitial) audio cable into the a/v receiver. Works great. If the a/v receiver would accept high-def audio through the HDMI cable then I could understand routing video through the a/v receiver too (since the HDMI cable carries both), but then it wouldn't be "HDMI pass-through" anymore. I thought the whole point of HDMI was to pass both audio and video (and add the security stuff), but when using it as a "pass-through" then it's only being used for video. In the a/v receiver described above, what is the intended mechanism for getting high-def audio from the HDDVD player to the a/v receiver?