The SM I have is a GREAT bargain for what it does.
Analog will never go away altogether, being that sound and ears are both analog. HDMI standards change. Shielded wire has not changed.
Actually, human hearing is much closer to digital in nature than analog. All the signals from the ear get converted to neuron impulses which occur in digital-like streams, although it's not in binary code.
HDMI has added support for newer standards, but it's all backwards compatible. For audio use only, it wouldn't matter.
More to the point, there is no other standard used in most consumer level gear for multi-channel.
It's not a question of whether the SM is a bargain for what it does. If the consumer cannot hook it up to their equipment, it really doesn't matter.
I would rather have an external device to convert multichannel audio to HDMI (when I eventually need it), but I do not need it now, and standards may change by the time I "need" it. I'm talking about 40 years down the road. If I don't make it I know my quad gear will.
40 years down the road? Atmos is here now and quite frankly, it blows quad out the water, eats it for breakfast and craps it out as fertilizer. If you heard Booka Shade, Kraftwerk or Yello in Atmos on my system, you might just want to throw your quad gear in the garbage and light it on fire.
Sadly, most albums are not in Atmos (yet), which is why the older 2-channel and 4.0 and 5.1 surround music is still viable. Much of it can be improved further with Auro-3D upmixer expansion or even Dolby DSU Surround or Neural X in some cases.
Auro-3D has some nice music albums as well that sound like you're really there. Meanwhile, Loreena Mckennit's first major album should arrive any day now in Atmos.
[Hey! Maybe some other company wants to get in on the analog-to-hdmi converter market! Niche within a niche within a niche.]
I wish they would. I searched high and low for a converter. None exist.
I've long thought hdmi is a content protection scheme first, and incidentally convenient for consumers, But not robust, especially compared to pro level stuff.
It doesn't really protect anything anymore since we don't have consumer digital recorders anymore and dumping a movie from a Blu-ray into an MKV sans protection is child's play. I can dump/copy 4K Blu-ray discs no problem. Copy protection is and always has been a joke and harms honest consumers (by being a royal PITA most of the time) far more than pirates. Meanwhile, many of us just want to stream locally off our own servers instead of searching for a movie disc when we have 1400+ discs to look through, let alone 26,000 music tracks.