If your camcorder is encoding the audio in DTS, that would explain why you aren't getting any sound from the EVA. The EVA doesn't have a built in DTS decoder so you have to have a receiver to do the decoding. (my first guess as to what is happening).

On the transcoding issue, the VGA from HD has to be how you have the Sony Picture Maker program configured. It sounds like it is transcoding the file to a poorer quality format.

For these types of media questions, I'd recommend going to the Netgear EVA9150 forums (http://forum1.netgear.com/forumdisplay.php?f=39) and posting your questions along with the media info on your original file. (The prefered program for file information is Mediainfo ( http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en) ) There are a lot of advanced users that have a great deal of experience with file formats and conversions. Posting the Mediainfo output for your file is the easiest way to see what is going on in the file.