Well how exactly would it be different at all? A cd is digital audio, a dvd is digital audio, dsd is digital audio...the outputs are just transmitting a digital signal to your amp. I don't see why there would be a DAC>ADC step going on within the player itself unless there's a channel summing for surround to stereo that happens in front of the SPDIF output. I don't imagine there's anything of that nature going on since there's a multichannel digital output via HDMI. There's a DAC in front of the analog outputs, possibly a summing amp also to resolve to 2 tracks, and POSSIBLY the SPDIF incorporates an ADC post summing amp to output a digital stereo signal. That seems like an awful lot of needless converting going on but who knows what the designers did. What you should do is play a surround formated disc and then output only with the SPDIF to see if there's a summed stereo output of all channels or only 2 channels of the mix being output.