HT noob with an OVERLOAD issue

Re: HT noob with an OVERLOAD issue

I am having the same issue with this receiver.  I bought the receiver with speakers a couple of years ago.  It has only been recently I have had this issue.  I changed from the RC cables for audio to a digital coax for my blu-ray player.  Ever since I have done this I get the overload when the volume is turned over 18.  Do you think the cable I got is bad?

I do have a subwoofer and all speakers are set to small.

I have the issue playing both movies and cd's.

I don't think a bad cable would cause that type of problem. If the cable was bad there wouldn't be any signal transfer or it might be intermitten but not what you're discribing.

I doubt this is the answer but when you changed from the red and white rca cables to the digital coaxial cable did you go into the players setup menu and change the audio output from PCM to Bitstream?

Yes I did make the change but didn't stop the issue.  I'm thinking the problem may be in my speaker wire for the surround sound.  When I had the receiver hooked with just the RC jacks, the subwoofer and surround wouldn't work.  Now with the digital cable, everything works but I started getting the overload error.  The only thing I can come up with is bad wire for the surround speakers.  What is the minimum gauge wire I should use?  The speakers are 110W / 8 Ohm and the wire is awg20.  I think this is probably my problem.  I didn't pay attention to the wire, I just used what I had at the house. 

The surround speakers are about 12-13 feet from the receiver but I had to run them up through the ceiling to hide the wires so the total run is about 24' for the wire. 

16g is the smallest I use. The reason the sub and surrounds didn't work with the rca jacks is probably because the receiver was in stereo mode and not sending a signal to them. You can try installing larger wire but I can't imagine that would fix the problem (but you never know).