Question About Display on Sony STR-DH700 A/V Receiver (1 Viewer)

[Mark Abrams]

I notice when I play back discs from my Blu-Ray player, using only the HDMI connector to my receiver (Sony STR-DH700), that the display on my
receiver doesn't show the audio format being played (i.e. Dolby Digital, or DTS etc) when I have the sound output on the Blu-Ray set to PCM. If I set it to Bistream (audiophile) output, the receiver is forced to do the decoding and it shows the type of audio on the display, however Bistream (audiophile) setting isn't capable of transmitting secondary or effect audio on the soundtrack. I talked with their support people who at first were surprised that even "LPCM" didn't appear on the display, let alone DD or DTS, but in the end said that showing only "HDMI" on the receiver display is OK as long as I'm hearing the sound from all speaker sources properly.

Has anyone had experience with this? The support person also told me to I shouldn't have both an HDMI and an optical cable attached from the Blu-Ray player to the A/V receiver, since HDMI can do it all...

 

[Stephen Tu]

The DH700 will decode DD/DTS but not TrueHD/DTS-HD. So normally you want the player to do all the decoding, set to PCM. For regular DVDs, or Blu-ray with regular DD, it really doesn't matter in theory where you do the decoding, so just leave it on PCM so you don't have to switch all the time.

There may not even be an "LPCM" indicator on this particular model, nothing to light up. The receiver is getting PCM from the player, so there's no reason for it to display DD/DTS. LPCM is what you get when you decode DD/DTS/etc.; no way for receiver to know what you started with. If you want to see the "DTS" indicator somewhere, hit "info" or "display" on your BD .

Optical cable is overridden by the HDMI, most likely, so it doesn't matter that you have it hooked up, but it's not doing anything either so you might as well take it out.