Well, EAC3, also known as Dolby Digital plus, is something like TrueHD or DTS-HD. It comes with a data rate higher than SPDIF can handle. An unmodiefied transfer is designated to be transfered via HDMI only, says the german Wikipedia So if one wants to passthrough EAC3, means: the unaltered data stream, via Spdif, this won't work because of higher data rates.