No Sound from Music or Photos

This morning I played a photo slideshow for the first time since updating to 4.1. I noticed the default music was not playing. I switched to the Music menu to play from My Music and again, nothing but a silent, moving progress bar. Yet if I play a movie or TV show from Media (Sapphire) I get glorious 5.1 dolby sound. If I reboot the finder everything comes back for a while but eventually I loose the Music audio again and have to re-reboot.

A little back ground… My TV speakers are worthless so I keep them muted and run all sound through the toslink connection to the home theater amp. The video is delivered via an HDMI cable to the TV (as I write this I realize I haven’t checked to see if the audio is getting through the HDMI to the TV speakers… I’ll get right on that). I was plying with audio settings in various menus to get ripped DVDs to play 5.1 sound. I was successful with that but now I wonder if I did something to cause this annoying situation.

Thoughts and advice will be welcome.

Follow up…

Audio from iTunes is coming through the HDMI cable but something is stopping it from getting through the optical output. Movies/Video seem to be unaffected. ACC pass through is enabled in Maintenance settings. DVD 5.1 is enabled in NitoTV. Rebooting the ATV finder corrects the issue until a 5.1 dolby movie is played, then another reboot is needed. Could this have something to do with the Start up sound issue?