digital coaxial question (1 Viewer)

[andre-k]

This might sound like a stupid question but I was wonderig if I still need to have regular rca cables as well as a digital coaxial cable for my dvd player connected to my reciever. For some reason it is not playing my cd's through digital input but I have a feeling I just need to set something on my reciever. Any help would be appreciated

 

[Christian_R]

It's not a stupid question at all. Until I sat down and read the manual to my receiver I didn't know either.

On receivers, you have to designate what function gets the "digital" connection whether it be coax or optical. Read through your manual and you will likely find a section on digital audio and how to set it. I don't believe any receiver comes with this defaulted to "DVD" or "CD" and so it has to be set by the user.

You are likely not using your digital audio at all at this point.

Chris

 

[Rick_Brown]

Andre, what you need to understand is that if you listen to CD's via a coax cable then your receiver is doing the digital-to-analog-conversion (DAC). If you connect and listen via analog (RCA) cables then your DVD-player is performing the DAC. Sometimes one way sounds better than the other as the DAC's may be of higher quality in one of the machines.

You'll definitely want to get your digital coax connection working correctly for movies, though!

 

[John Garcia]

Giving the information about what equipment we are talking about can often help a lot.

If your DVDs are playing through the receiver, then CDs should as well.

Are you listening to CDs on the DVD input? If you switch to CD, you will not hear anything because you typically cannot assign one digital input to mulitple sources (This would serve no purpose anyway).

If you make your analog connections to another input, ie; CD, you should get sound. Right now, if you have the analog and digital inputs connected to the same source on the receiver, you may only hear sound from whichever one that input is configured for. Many receivers do not automatically switch between inputs for a single source. Mine has a button to force this switch, but I find it much easier to just use another available input. Example: For my SACD player, I have to use the multichannel analogs to listen to SACDs, but for regular CDs, I use the CDR stereo analog inputs on my receiver (bass management issue necessitates this).