Regardless of the CD, however, my BIG issue is that the source material I'm trying to output to SONOS is from vinyl albums playing on a turntable. The turntable is connected to a preamp and the preamp is connected to the Onkyo at the PHONO inputs. Selecting PHONO plays great through the main speakers attached to the 656, but no sound comes through the SONOS system, no matter whether Zone 2 is on or off or if I reselect PHONO while Zone 2 is on. I had been assuming audio from the preamp would not have been affected by that HDMI issue.
In my research journey I made a couple of calls to Yamaha and Onkyo product support. I can't remember which one, but one of them explained that a turntable with a moving magnet cartridge (hope I have this terminology correct) can just plug directly into the ports on the receiver. However, a turntable with a moving coil cannot and you need an external preamp or adapter or something. I have yet to look into what kind of cartridge I have... But maybe that has something to do with your problem, IDK...?
This is frustrating. I did an unbelievable amount of research before purchasing my Onkyo TX-NR797 today - and the biggest thing I wanted to make sure of was that I could duplicate my previous 7.2 with "speaker A/B" arrangement (to accommodate my two porch speakers). I even called Onkyo product support twice and never was it mentioned that HDMI posed a problem for Zone 2 usage. Of course I find this thread *after* I've made my purchase and painstakingly hooked everything up.
So first of all I should say that I'm actually pretty happy with the unit. Sound, set-up, features, all good. I have even successfully been able to use Zone 2 for AM/FM radio, no problem. But I couldn't figure out why that worked but I couldn't stream audio from my PC or Wii out there (I don't really want to send Wii audio out there, it was just another data point for testing Zone 2 capabilities). And I guess now I know. I had read those excerpts in the manual but I was incredulous.
The thing about "speaker A/B" is that those channels are shared with other channels on the receiver, so when you use those B speakers along with the main, the power is shared and thus cut. I never found this to be a problem or even noticed, but I was happy to learn that this legit 9.2 system would be a step up from my previous system in that regard.
I'm going to try some other cables and see what happens, but I'm not sure what is meant by "When the AV component is connected to this unit with a digital coaxial cable or digital optical cable, change the audio output of the AV component to the PCM output." So like how do I do that for my PC? What are they trying to tell me to do? How do I change the audio output of my PC to PCM? And this is really annoying, because I was so happy to be able to do away with superfluous cables and just use simple HDMI for everything, reducing the rats nest of cables behind my cabinet.
But seriously, man, this thing was over $700, that I happily paid because I was getting exactly what I wanted and an upgrade. I could have gotten a cheaper Yamaha and now I wonder if the Yamaha would have presented the same issues...
The receiver I'm replacing was a 12-year-old Sony. I can't believe we haven't progressed farther than this in the industry.