Audio hookups, what am I doing wrong? (1 Viewer)

[JosephCon]

I have a Pioneer VSXD508 receiver with a Samsung DVDS221 DVD player. My speakers are a JBL SCS125 home theatre package. I am getting a new RP set tomorrow and am trying to make the most out of my sound so I went out and bought a digital coax for the receiver to DVD connection and some component video for the DVD to TV.

Question is, when I hook the digital coax to the DVD by itself I get no sound at all. I have to hook analog cables to it for it to work. Did I waste 20$ on a cable? Seems like all the manuals say I should be able to hook up a DVD directly and have sound, I tried a 5.1 DVD and a CD but no luck.

Secondly, my speaker set usually gets hooked into the subwoofer and then into the receiver but it says it can also do line connections. I can connect the satellite speakers to the receiver fine but the subwoofer has two line outs (R/L) and my receiver doesnt appear to have any subwoofer line outs. It has a single sub pre-out but I tried hooking into it and it does nothing. If I hook the line ins to the receivers other line outs with L/R channels (like VCR) it works but I am afraid that I am going to damage something in the process.

Anyone have some advice?

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Hi Joseph. Welcome to HTF!

There are 2 setups you may have to do:

Receiver: When you hit the "DVD" button on your remote, how does your receiver know what signal to look at? The analog, the optical or the coaxial-digital? Some receivers offer a "Auto Detect" option, but some dont. Go into your receivers setup menu and tell it that you want it to pay attention to the coaxial-digital connection.

DVD Player: The analog outputs tend to work all the time. But you may have a "Digital" vs "PCM" vs "other" setup. Go to the DVD setup menu and make sure you have something like DD, DD5.1, "Dolby", etc., turned on.

Hope this helps.

 

[Jack Briggs]

Bob's option #2 is the usual explanation for when people ask about this. Enable the "bitstream" option (or, depending how the player's setup menu is worded, the Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 options). Right now, your receiver doesn't even know it is receiving a digital signal.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Re your receiver’s menu: With many receivers the digital inputs (optical and coaxial) must be assigned to a particular input. So be on the watch for that, in case that is the kind of receiver you have.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[JosephCon]

Thanks for the replies. The receiver is set to DVD for coax so I at least got that portion right. I dont have the TV yet so I can check the settings for the DVD player tomorrow. That very well could be the piece of information I forgot about. Thanks!

BTW, anyone have any ideas on the subwoofer problem?

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Forgot to comment on that - sorry.

All you need to do is send the single line-out of the receiver to one of the sub line ins. Or you can get a “y” splitter and feed the signal into both sub inputs. Either method is fine.

As to why the sub doesn’t work – if you’re already getting no audio because something isn’t set up right, it stands to reason that the sub also won’t do anything until you address that issue.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Dave Poehlman]

but the subwoofer has two line outs (R/L) and my receiver doesnt appear to have any subwoofer line outs. It has a single sub pre-out but I tried hooking into it and it does nothing.

On my Pioneer I had to go in and turn the subwoofer on. Then I ran an audio cable from the sub pre-out to the left input jack on the sub amp (check the inputs on the sub.. one should be marked "mono" it's usually the left... if not, use the Y-splitter mentioned above and connect to both). I made sure the sub's variable crossover was turned all the way up and that was it.