I have received alot of valuable advice on this board, so now that I have all my new gear (very happy), I ran into a curious thing -
Sony ships a multi-channel SACD disk with the 555ES player (Dylan). Mine is hooked up to an NAD T763 via optical link. The disk will play in 2 channel but I get no sound in multi-channel -
Yes, Sony do not want you to be able to play SACD through the optical link, in case you try to copy the disc. They will never let a receiver incorporate the digital decoder/processor, unless we all stop buying their stuff, so they have no choice. They are into market control, not sound quality, and not value to the customer.
You should connect with analogue interconnects to the Ext 5.1 input on the receiver.