Cool stuff ! Congrats on your new buit.
May I suggest a minor upgrade after a while : a good soundcard such as Audiotrak Prodigy HD2 for excellent audio output even on its analogue. That way you get the best of music playback even on stereo.

But great stuff you got there.

What OS you got there ?

Tbob87, what I did to my system is more like falling into place on its own rather than by design.

I got an AV Amp that originally picked up the Toslink link from my Htpc Mobo audio digital out like you did initially. But since I have a vintage ampliflier lying around idle (a good marantz circa 1978), I use that vintage as the power amp for the front 2 LR speakers. My AV Amp become a pre-amp for the front two speakers, but still drive my centre and surrounds.

The hifi vintage Amp is of better quality audio wise it seems. So it stays that way for now.

With the newly upgraded Prodigy HD2 (rm390 brand new from lowyat), I configure the foobar 2000 to apply only on stereo playback thru the soundcard only whenever I clicked on Flac or APE or anything audio only files.

I compared the audio quality of this step up, ie. playing my CD thru HTPC and Thru my CDP (Marantz CD 52 Mk II, another old stuff), HTPC with Prodigy is actually of better quality then my Hifi CD player ! Maybe its due to age of my CDP I don't know. So now I can literally stop using CDP for a while. ( I also plan to upgrade the chip on the soundcard now to play around with it for better sound.)

Just to share.