The real opposition is that I have a really nice 5.1 home theater setup, and I'm disgusted that I can't output proper DD5.1 sound to it because I don't have a soundcard w/ a DD encoder. So it's more a protest I hate to buy a set of 5.1 speakers JUST for the computer when I'm already hooked up to 5.1 speakers with SPDIF on the same computer. If I buy another set of speakers just for the computer, the setup for those becomes sort of funky (my room layout isn't particularly conducive to it). The headphones route seemed sort of low-impact until a soundcard comes out that can do DD encoding natively.

I wonder if anyone has made a software audio driver that does DD encoding on the fly that can output over SPDIF, though I suspect DD encoding must just be too processor intensive for that to be feasible.

ms