I couldn't follow your posts.
From what I could grab, you want to be able to watch movies with the receiver sound, then...go right back to the pc and game via headphone/mic?
Thats pretty simple if you have digital sound out...just run your gaming stuff with analog and turn off the receiver when not in use. I did that for a while.
If you want stuff separate...just buy a soundcard OR enable your onboard, use whichever for one and assign a separate card for gaming. That works really well because then you can game WHILE using the sound for the theater
Sorry for not being clear about what I am hoping to achieve, but I believe you've answered fairly close to what I asked about.
I would just like to have an easy transition from gaming to listening to audio on my PC, as well as pulling together true surround sound for both applications.
From that point it has been confusing to know in what direction to accomplish something that integrates well.
You have mentioned buying another sound card which I believe would allow the seperation between gaming and home theater. My sound from the headphones and mic would be available for any time I'd want to get into a game. My home theater speakers would also be active, but I could turn them off through the receiver anytime I was in a game. Conversely I wouldn't really have to do anything if I wanted to listen to music through the home theater because the headphones would silence the noise.
Until I make the decision of what I really want to do I bought a $5 splitter. I will operate this exactly in the way I believe you mentioned above.
Where this gets confusing is in the method of achieving 5.1 sound over the home theater. I don't believe I have the equipment on hand to achieve this. I could get lucky and find an HDMI PCI Express card that handles full audio, that integrates with the 2 8800 PCI Express cards that I have configured in SLI. If that didn't get me the 5.1 sound I would hopefully have an SPDIF connection that somehow would allow me to patch in the 5.1 sound. (I'm not sure of how this would connect) Or another possibility would be in buying an expensive sound card which has an HDMI output, and hopefully achieve 5.1 sound through this. (Once again I'm unclear of the connections necessary) I hope I don't sound stupid; I've just read a lot of misleading information in getting the sound connections right.
Another thing that confuses me is whether I want to try making my mic input and outputs go through an independent channel seperate from game sound (such as what I mentioned with bluetooth through teamspeak), or if I should disconnect the home theater sound completely when I want to get into a game with a mic.
The route that I really want to take, might be the one that would cause the most grief in getting there. I would like to incorporate my home theater sound in my games, and have voice in a seperate channel which would go through a headpiece.
It appears I won't be putting this all together this weekend; if you have a successful sound setup you'd like to share I would be very interested to hear about how you achieved this.