I know there is more than I am hearing!!!

[Greg]

Hi Chris, I was working on my home theater today and I feel I am missing the true power/ fidelity my system can offer me. I have a Yamaha HTR 6090 receiver/ direct tv- hddvr/ ps3/ Samsung 61 inch DLP 1080i/ Axiom 5.1 speakers with the subwoofer being a Klipsch 300 w. down firing sub. I am running hdmi cables from the dvr to the tv, hdmi from the ps3 to the tv. Then I noticed I have an optical cable running from the Yamaha to the tv. For some reason this seems weak to me. Should I use a hdmi cable from the receiver? There are 3 Hdmi outputs on the receiver yet I am using none I feel I have a decent system, and Im just not satisfied with the results. BTW, the room dimensions are 14 x 20, and the rear speakers are Axioms quad speakers- on the wall head level. Also: The system is designated a 7.1 but due to the size of the room I felt that to be overkill ( not to mention keeping harmony with the wife, hehe ) Thank you, Greg

[MrBoylan]

Hi Chris, I was working on my home theater today and I feel I am missing the true power/ fidelity my system can offer me. I have a Yamaha HTR 6090 receiver/ direct tv- hddvr/ ps3/ Samsung 61 inch DLP 1080i/ Axiom 5.1 speakers with the subwoofer being a Klipsch 300 w. down firing sub. I am running hdmi cables from the dvr to the tv, hdmi from the ps3 to the tv. Then I noticed I have an optical cable running from the Yamaha to the tv. For some reason this seems weak to me. Should I use a hdmi cable from the receiver? There are 3 Hdmi outputs on the receiver yet I am using none I feel I have a decent system, and Im just not satisfied with the results. BTW, the room dimensions are 14 x 20, and the rear speakers are Axioms quad speakers- on the wall head level. Also: The system is designated a 7.1 but due to the size of the room I felt that to be overkill ( not to mention keeping harmony with the wife, hehe ) Thank you, Greg

Hello, Greg and welcome to the forum!

A couple of things are going on here. First of all, routing your audio sources through the TV and into the receiver is a bad idea because most TVs will actually strip out the discrete surround from the audio mix and will pass a 2-channel PCM signal out of the fiberoptic output. The fiberoptic digital output will only include a discrete 5.1 channel Dolby Digital mix when you use the TV's built in ATSC or QAM digital tuner. So you are not getting discrete 5.1 surround from your PS3 or satellite box. You're getting 2-channel sound decoded to pseudo-surround via Dolby ProLogic II decoding.

Secondly, the PS3, or really any Blu-ray player for that matter, can only output lossless multi-channel surround soundtracks over HDMI (or over multi-channel analog outputs on select players), so if you want to get the full quality of Blu-ray Disc soundtracks, you will need to connect the HDMI cable directly from PS3 to receiver. Because your receiver does not include on-board decoding for DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD, you do need to set your PS3's HDMI audio output to PCM (instead of bitstream). When you do this, the PS3 will internally decode DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD soundtracks to uncompressed multi-channel PCM which it then sends out via HDMI to your receiver. There is no real compromise here compared to using the bitstream output option - DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD are "lossless" encoding formats - they compress an original multi-channel L-PCM digital stream into a smaller, encoded stream without losing any of the quality. The decoding process restores that original multi-channel L-PCM soundtrack in bit-perfect precision.

Also, depending on which PS3 you own (original or slim), you'd need to use the PCM output anyway, even *WITH* a receiver with DTS-HD/Dolby TrueHD decoding, because the original PS3 could not pass these surround formats over bitstream (the PS3 slim can do this).

So, to recap, HDMI from set top box to receiver, HDMI from PS3 to receiver, PS3's HDMI digital output set to "PCM," HDMI from receiver out to TV. All source switching is now done on the receiver instead of the TV. One side note: if you have other sources that you want to connect to the system, your best bet is to connect these to the receiver and let the receiver upconvert these to 1080i for connection to the TV (particularly if these sources are digital). Your other option would be to connect them to the TV then use the TV's analog or fiberoptic outputs to get sound through your receiver but this will lose any discrete surround from a digital source and it means you have to worry about setting the TV to one input while setting the receiver to something else for each source.

BTW, IMHO, 7.1 channels is overkill for most rooms. 5.1 is most of what you'll find on DVD and Blu-ray, and any 7.1 soundtracks can easily be folded back down into 5.1 by the player or the receiver. So you don't need to worry that you're missing out on anythnig by using 5.1 instead of 7.1.

Let us know if you have any other qusetions.

Regards,

-Chris