Thanks for your reply 

Here are the last few emails from creative:

Quote:
With regards to your inquiry, you may connect your PS3 to the sound card
through optical cable. However, the newer batch of Sound Blaster sound
cards do not come with built-in decoder. Therefore it will not do any
decoding that is required for DVD playback.

For your information, your current sound card Audigy 2 ZS comes with
built-in decoder,but it does not come with any optical input port.
Therefore I would suggest you to look for Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Upgrade
Kit. Is is a 5.25-inch drive bay module extends the connectivity and
functionality of the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. The I/O drive will come
with optical and coaxial digital I/O that will allow you to connect your
PS3 to the sound card.

From this it would seem possible that it would work.  These kits are <£40 on ebay but before I bought I asked them to confirm that if I played a Blu-ray movie or game on the PS3 the 5.1 channels would be retained.  I got this back:

Quote:
With regards to your inquiry, Blu-ray movie and games normally comes
with encoding like Dolby Digital or DTS. However, optical signal only
outputs one signal.Therefore, the decoding to multiple channels or the
effects will be done to your optical speakers. Therefore, you need to
check with your optical speaker manufacturer whether your speakers can
do so.

This response completely contradicts the previous one!  As stated earlier my Audigy 2 ZS  isn't on their site anymore but the notebook version is and the specs state that that it supports DD and DTS...
I don't think the person writing this last response even read any of the previous correspondence because I already stated they were my speaker's manufacturer 

For obvious reasons I'd rather spend £40 on that kit than £400 on a receiver but then again the receiver would support the new HD sound formats and would future proof me for a while (I'm quessing there wouldn't be any problem playing the HD formats through my speakers?)

This is the receiver I've been looking at:


Looking at those connections is there anything to make you think it wouldn't work?  A guy on another forum said that I may need to add some resistors to the speaker connections to avoid blowing the speakers or have the reciever at a very low volume.


Thanks to all who have taken the time to post so far, this thread is getting a little lengthy 

That second email sounds like the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I have never heard of an "optical speaker". It would have to have its own decoder and amplifier!

However, I did find this post on a forum, which sounds kinda scary:
"I am currently routing bitstream DTS from my PS3 to my Audigy 2 ZS SPDIF IN via optical cable - the Audigy can decode this signal to my 5.1 speakers.... but unfortunately this adds about a 50ms delay that ruins lip sync."

Dedicated hardware may be the way to go.

Hmm.. the 606 doesn't appear to have 5.1/7.1 pre-outs.

This just means that you have to connect it directly to the speakers. There is a subwoofer pre-out for the sub. The Onkyo probably has better amplifiers anyway 

I believe you'll need to connect the PS3 to the receiver via HDMI to get 7.1 channels, and you must set the PS3 to output in Linear PCM 7.1. The PS3 will not output DTS-MA and DD TrueHD in bitstream (so that your receiver decodes it), it only does the decoding internally.