i have a sony str-de998, decent reveiver but on the lossless 5.1 pcm for any blu rays or games is shows up as stereo, the left and right speakers, under auto format decode. this issue is starting to annoy me, is there any way i can get it to decode normal surround or a surround sound signal?

also i big blue bar lights up when it is multichannel decoding and unless im watching a regular dvd i cannot get this feature to work with blu ray or ps3 games, and audio hooked up through optical video through hdmi

Isn't PCM just for HDMI for to have lossless sound? You can't do that through an optical cable, use bitstream instead.

why do you have optical audio when you have an hdmi cable hooked up for the video?

actually, i think i can figure it out, your receiver doesn't have hdmi? but yea, what epsilon said