richms:
Oh no, I hope they dont turn on the fake surround option. I cant stand even dolby prologic processing on stereo stuff, hate to think what the encoder will do to make noise that shouldnt be there come from speakers that are not meant to be active.
From what i've heard this "fake surround" is much better than the prologic / PLII stuff, the unit that does it is brand new and fabulously expensive. If it does bother you I guess you could switch to the AAC stream for non native 5.1 programs, or switch your receiver to only output two channels.
As for the mux capacity, each mux has only a certain amount of bandwidth, all TVNZ channels are statistically multiplexed into single data stream which is then broadcast on a specific frequency. The more channels you add to the mux the less data there is per channel. The only way around this is to create a 2nd TVNZ mux on another frequency, which I imagine will eventually happen, but probably not for a while. I don't think there is the demand for 6 & 7 in HD to justify the expense at this point.