Sony BDP-S2000ES Blue-ray question

I'm not sure I understand this.

Why doesn't the unit have a digital audio output like their non Blue Ray players? Then you could send the Blue Ray/HD video over the HDMI and have the choice not to use HDMI for the audio output. By using analog PCM, will the unit produce a analog signal that isn't DD, DD-DTS etc? Or will the processor convert the analog signal into digital format?

I'd rather not use the HDMI for audio input but rather s seperate digital output into my processor.

What am I missing?

According to the owners manual:

Bitstream Dolby HD, DTS HD, etc via HDMI

WILL NOT bitstream regular Dolby Digital and DTS via HDMI (it must come through using the digital output or via the 5.1 analogue outputs.)

The HDMI will pass analogue HD audio signals also.

The digital out will not do the new audio formats. I know of no machine that will do it.

For all the information, you can go to www.sony.com and look at the full owners manual.

Thanks for the responses. I do not yet own the player so I was not able to look at the owner's manual (did not check online, thanks for the tip). In a perfect world it would seem that the new-gen blue-ray players that advertise internal decoding should decode all the new surround formats and the older ones back to original DD/DTS and pass them out the analog 5.1 jacks to make them backward compatable, but the description on the Sony website was a little confusing in this regard. I've always used the processor built into my DVD player since my system's receiver will not decode DD/DTS but fortunately it has analog 5.1 inputs. No HDMI, either. Thanks Bigtee, looks like this player might just work ok in my sytem. -jz

BDP-2000ES will not decode DTS-HD MA but will decode the rest such as DTS-HD HR, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, DD+ etc.. Hopefully, Sony will come out with a firware upgrade to fix this. Fireware V3.6 will not have DTS-HD MA fix.