I am by no means tech savvy in any way so please excuse the following couple of questions and something that happened recently.

I currently have mysky with hd ticket.

All of a sudden I lost sound to both sky sports 1 and 3 , I had sound on all other channels but these two. I rang sky and a tech come out the following day and had a look. He said it was very bizarre and he had never seen anything like it. He swapped out the boxes and all was good again.

Now for a question or two. I have just upgraded my sound system and have things setup as follows. Mysky has hdmi directly out and into my new receiver and my receiver has an hdmi out which goes to the tv (51 Samsung plasma). Everything is working fine (well as far as i know) I set the hdmi sound setup to dolby in mysky but I am unable to alter the volume with the mysky remote. If I change it back to mpeg/pcm I am able to alter the volume with the mysky remote again, Is this normal ??. Its just that its a pain having to have a gaggle of remotes sitting around to alter this or that.
If I have it on Dolby the receiver reflects Dolby digital on the receiver for channel 3 and sky movies 1 and 3 , How many other channels are Dolby digital as a lot of the other ones I changed to the receiver dropped back to pcm and only 2 channels.