Agreed. The box needs to be passing on stereo content (regardless of being delivered by Freeview or IP) to the AV receiver, rather than doing any conversion to it.
The whole purpose of an AV receiver is to manage audio, and different viewers will prefer different methods of listening to stereo content on a 5.1 setup. A set top box shouldn't be forcing how the user should be listening to the content.
A lot of stereo content on TV is downmixed by the broadcasters from 5.1 using ProLogic, can be upmixed back to surround sound by almost any AV reciever. This has been the standard for decades.
But this requires the AV reciever to actually be receiving a stereo signal from the source device. By re-encapsulating the stereo audio into a 5.1 Dolby signal, as the new Pro box does, this is preventing the AV receiver from doing this upmix.
@DarrenDev- if audio always being output as DD+ 5.1 is classed as "by design" by the dev team, then is is a poor design and should be reconsidered. I'm not sure what problem the team thought it was resolving, but it is severely limiting the listening enjoyment of stereo content for those of us with surround sound setups. The previous generation of YouView boxes handle this correctly, and as I would expect any device from any manufacturer to do. What is being done on the new Pro box is abnormal, and very much goes against the standard norms of AV setups.
If the dev team are determined to keep everything in DD+, rather than switching to native PCM for stereo content, then the box should at least be re-encapsulating these to DD+ 2.0 rather than the current DD+ 5.1 behaviour. This would still allow AV receivers to then upmix as preferred by the viewer.
