TCM shows mainly old mono movies, my AV amp says 48kHz PCM stereo on the several I tried. I sampled a few programmes in the library - all 48kHz PCM stereo.

As far as I know, only Stereo (2.0 ) is transmitted, some times with un-signalled Dolby Pro Logic style centre (sum of left and right) and surround (difference of left and right delayed 25ms ). It would/should be possible to transmit more than 2 channel sound, but you would still need the stereo for all those DVB-T receivers that don't support higher numbers of channels. I think it was decided to go with MPEG multichannel (and not Dolby or DTS ) which many AV amps don't understand (this could be the case with the tests above.)

When the broadcasters are trying shovel quantity over quality, then in their minds, Dolby Pro Logic over stereo is going to be good enough and most people wont notice.

If the competition is Sky - the Sky digital STB doesn't appear to have a digital audio output - AFAIK, Sky HD gets 5.1 sound (and digital audio output). DVB-T/DTT (Freeview/TopUp/Setanta ) are not going to beat Sky on channels, but they could beat them on quality.

It's annoying, you get a 5.1 speaker set up in your living room and make sure your DVB-T/Freeview receiver(s) have digital audio outputs and all that comes out is stereo - you even have to manually flip a switch to make it do Dolby Pro Logic.

If there were a vote, I would vote for 5.1 sound, even at the loss of a shopping channel or +1 channel