Why won't hardly any of my Dolby Digital EX titles get flagged correctly? (1 Viewer)

[Nick Graham]

I just hooked up my Kenwood VR-6060 (on sale at best Buy for $295), and while I love the receiver, I have noticed none of the following Dolby Digital EX titles I have, despite specifically advertising an EX soundtrack, are getting auto-detected by my Kenwood as EX; FOTR:EE, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., and Star Wars Episode 1 & II. So basically, none of the Dolby Digital EX titles I have aside from the two made by Artisan (the T2 and Stargate UEs) are being detected as EX by my receiver.

Is this very common? I can of course tell the receiver to go into Dolby Digital EX mode for these titles, but I can do that for any DVD I have that has a non-EX 5.1 track. Am I still hearing the EX track as intended when I have to manually tell the receiver to go into EX for these 6.1 titles, or is it just the receiver manipulating the rear channels like it does for DVDs that are non-EX and 5.1 only? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but last night marks my first foray into 6.1 audio.

 

[Steve Schaffer]

Nick,

Early on some EX receivers got tripped up by the EX flagging, so the flagging was left off most EX titles. Manually turning on the EX decoding as you are doing is giving you true EX decoding as intended. It's a minor annoyance having to turn it on manually, othewise not an issue as far as sound quality.

 

[Steve Y]

This is a good question, Nick, the sort that doesn't get asked enough!

I have a 6.1 (discrete) receiver with only a 5.1 speaker setup. The receiver (a Sony) has never "recognized" DD-EX tracks (which, as I understand it, use phase inversion to give the impression of a center rear channel).

Though technically I think it should be able to handle both discrete (DTS-ES) and non-discrete (DD-EX) rear surround activity, it only auto-detects the DTS because of the discrete center signal being decoded. It comes up as:

3/2(+1)

For DD-EX I either keep with auto-detect or turn on everything to "6.1" and hope that I'm hearing what I'm supposed to be hearing! But the receiver appears to decode it as standard DD. (in other words, I simply don't know.) There's not any mention of DD-EX support in the manual, so perhaps I'm just getting the budget experience with my (quite expensive) receiver.

~s