I disagree, down-mixing is not always as clear cut as that, and a lot of TV's these days simply do audio on the cheap, hell some of them struggle to even pass-though 5.1 let alone process it, and that's before you consider the quality (or lack of) in D/A conversion.graeme wrote:Yup, they will.
The alternative is to leave all your devices on 5.1 and let the TV do the down-mix for the hifi output. Try both ways and see if you can hear any difference.
There's massive variation in quality between devices when it comes to upscaling (e.g. making more channels of audio out of fewer, or making a HD picture out of a SD source) but with downmixing audio, the standards are the standards, and the downmixing information is encoded into the 5.1 stream by the studio (although these are only hints.. the decoder can ignore some of them, but then wouldn't be DTS certified or whatever), so chances are whether the PS4 or the TV does the work, it'll sound much the same. It'll be interesting to try though. I might have a go myself on mine some time. I've never experimented.
Put bluntly, even the cheap 3.1 sound bars are infinitely better at it.