Well, the subject sorta says it all. But I'll expand:

To an audiophile, (Im stereotyping here..), there really isn't much beyond 'stereo'. The theory simply goes that while a stereo setup has the potential of reproducing a concert like you're actually there - in the audience, a surround setup uses cute trickery that spreads the music all around you. Nice to amuse the kids, but it does not come close® to perfect reproduction, and therefore Will. Not. Do. (please don't start arguing this point in this topic - if you strongly disagree, start another)

Now while I subscribe to the idea that quadrophony is - in general - not suited for perfect reproduction, I also am a bit of a practical guy, and I would, on occasion, like to watch a movie where it would be fun to hear the helicopter behind me (while it's chasing Ahnold or something)

The question is: how to achieve this? How do I get the front section of a surround signal to my audiophile stereo, and get the rear signals to some auxilary audio gear? Obviously my 'main' stereo is capable of producing booming lows as well as decent stereo imaging, so I would say the typical 'left, center, right, subwoofer' channels should all be mixed into a stereo PCM mix (preferrably mixed at 24/96 or better) and sent digitally to my DAC. The rest (left rear, right rear, center rear, mid-rear .. etc) should be sent to some auxilary 'home theatre' thingy I could purchase, or perhaps another 'stereo' set? (hmm.. I could buy another copy of my audiophile set.. 4 quad 989 speakers all around me.. audiogasm!)

Anyway, the main issue, seems to be the splitting, re(mixing) etc of the digital multitrack source. Added to this is the problem of actually acquiring this signal, since especially HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use all types of restrictions so euphemistically called 'Digital Rights management' to prevent users from getting at unencrypted digital audio.

Thoughts?

Im fully open to any type of setup, be it PC/HTPC/xbox360 based, or settop based with AV/DTS/HDMI receivers etc, just as long as it gets the job done and doesn't sacrifice audio or video quality. For argument's sake, you are free to assume that ripping HD-DVD to harddisk is possible and not against the spirit of the law.

No insights whatsoever?

I've got a reply from the Gefen people, but Im still following up on what they actually mean. What I THINK they mean is that their scaler extracts left+right and send that on in 192/24 (if available) but I would have sortof expected the Center + LFE to be in there too.

It's not just that I strongly 'disagree', it's that this simply isn't an accurate claim -- it's been known for years, decades, that two channel stereo can't possibly replicate the 'live in the audience' experience, nor do I think even the most ardent audiophile believes it really does. It's been known for about as long, that adding more channels will bring you closer to that experience...e.g, because you can now have channels for 'ambience' present at live performances. More radical surround systems even add a height channel or two.

Gimmicky surround mixes of *studio* recordings are another matter entirely...there, there may be no real 'room' to reproduce the ambience of...obviously the same holds for movie mixes, which are usually entirely artificial.

Again, acoustic and psychoacoustic theory for decades has indicated that 'surround' (multichannel, > 2 channel) is a minimum requirement for reproducing a 3-dimensional soundfield. So your premises are a bit odd.