This player has the 7.1 analog outputs for those who don't have a receiver that can process all of the new codecs, and furthermore, it does process internally the lossless codecs and can pass them via HDMI as a PCM stream, so you can still get your lossless audio via HDMI to legacy HDMI receivers that again can't process the new codecs (like my Denon AVR-3806). Here are some pics from Sony.