Mac Mini Home Theatre PC + Lion = Big Bag of Hurt

I have a mac mini (2010) connected via HDMI to a switcher and on to either a TV or projector. The TV happens to be on a wall 90° to the projector screen. The audio is also wired via toslink/optical cable to the AV amplifier. The main speakers are aligned with the projection setup so its nice to have the TV sound come from the TV directly sometimes, even though the quality is dreadful compared to the main speakers (as opposed to rich sound coming from only the left side).
Running under Snow Leopard was fine - just switch the audio out from the HDMI to the Optical out at will (as one would expect through the sound output control panel).
Unfortunately I thought it would be cool to update to Lion to have a trackpad rather than the mouse on the coffee table. Bad idea!
Under 10.7.1 it all seemed to be working OK. Sound from main speakers, picture over HDMI on TV or projector. Sweet. Then I tried to change to the TV's speakers via the control panel. Nothing works. Click on either "optical out" or "Panasonic HDMI" and nothing changes, the audio keeps coming through the amplifier to the main speakers. Oh, well, the TV's sound was crap anyway, I could live with this at a push.
Update to 10.7.3. Whoops. Now the sound only comes out through the HDMI cable to the television. Permanently. Again, choosing either option in the control panel has no effect. Apple seems to have hardwired it this way and those options are an illusion. Now, I want to watch a movie - ZERO sound! The projector has no speaker, but apple is sending the audio there along the hdmi and I have no way of routing it to the Toslink cable anymore. Total train smash!! Silent movies - whoo hoo. Fail.
Annoyingly, this isn't a limitation of the hardware at all (it worked perfectly as expected in Snow Leopard) - its obviously a conscious decision. Or no one at apple bothers to test their stuff properly any more. All suggestions summarised - get new hardware - either new AV amplifier which accepts hdmi or extra cables to feed audio back from the TV to the amp!!?? Jeez. It used to work perfectly already without that.
Oh well, restoring to Snow Leopard as I type. Will have to find another use for that magic trackpad I stupidly bought on Monday. So if you have a Mac Mini Home Theatre PC and you need the options on routing video and audio separately, stay away from Lion!

You didn't need Lion in the first place for the track pad:
System Requirements
Bluetooth-enabled Mac computer
Two AA batteries (included)
OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.4 or later
I was using one with my 2010 Mini before Lion in my
HTPC setup.

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sjmcampbell wrote:
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Message was edited by: royfromchatteris

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Mac Mini Home Theatre PC + Lion = Big Bag of Hurt

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