No sound from surrounds
02-13-08, 11:14 PM
#1
DVD Talk Legend
Thread Starter
No sound from surrounds
I just set up a new home theater with a Pioneer Elite 91. I have both a Toshiba HD and a SONY Blu Ray player going through HDMI. On both machines I get almost no sound from the surrounds at all. If you get right next to the speaker you can hear a little bit of background noise, however it is inaudible during normal listening. I ran the test tones and they all some in the same volume. In the display it says, DD or DTS or whatever so it is reading something. There must be some setting I am missing. Any advice? Thanks,
02-14-08, 01:23 AM
#2
DVD Talk Special Edition
I have a Radio Shack sound level meter that I use in calibrating my setup, which reads the decibel level of each speaker, so the speakers are exactly matched. This is probably a little too far for most people, so you can try to sit in your listening position, run your test tone, and raise the levels of your back speakers until they seem matched to your fronts. It is also important to set your speaker distances in your receivers setup, this can add a big difference in making the rears noticeable.
02-14-08, 02:44 AM
#3
DVD Talk Legend
Remember, the surrounds aren't active all the time, just when they need to be. Some movies make no use of the surrounds at all, even though they are encoded in 5.1.
What are some of the movies you've tried with your setup?
What are some of the movies you've tried with your setup?
02-14-08, 07:59 AM
#4
DVD Talk Legend
Thread Starter
I watched Into the Blue, Night at the Museum, Transformers and Smokeyt and the Bandit so far. I realize they'll have varying degrees of rear activity, I'm getting nothing discernable however. During the test tones the speakers were at the same level as the fronts. I can trying cranking them up and see of that helps.
02-14-08, 08:32 AM
#5
DVD Talk Legend
Originally Posted by JimRochester
I watched Into the Blue, Night at the Museum, Transformers and Smokeyt and the Bandit so far. I realize they'll have varying degrees of rear activity, I'm getting nothing discernable however. During the test tones the speakers were at the same level as the fronts. I can trying cranking them up and see of that helps.
Did you use the
Automatic MCACC (Multi-Channel Acoustic Calibration System)?
Try a disc with known good rear surround info like planes flying over head, war scenes etc., Top Gun, Air Force One, Saving Private Ryan.
Last edited by Brian Shannon; 02-14-08 at 08:36 AM.
02-14-08, 10:47 AM
#7
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Is it just on HD and BD discs that you get barely any surround? How about DVDs? Broadcast HDTV?
I'd rent AVIA or DVE and calibrate the levels from that.
I'd rent AVIA or DVE and calibrate the levels from that.
02-14-08, 04:11 PM
#8
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This was an issue I had with my Hitachi HTIB (combo dvdplayer/receiver) --
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I don't know if your DVD player or receiver settings have DD options or features, but that's one option you may want to look at to see what the status is currently - I think this was a default setting on my player, but I could be mistaken.
I'm getting sound from 3 speakers right now -- the two front side ones and the front center one (although that appears to be one of the grayed out ones) -- the subwoofer also works sometimes from what I can tell. However, any time that the DVD player is actually turned on, you can pick up the electronic white noise coming from all of the speakers including the rear ones.
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The reason my DD options were grayed out was that I had made the mistake of leaving Downmix Turned On in a different menu -- I misunderstood the manual on this point. That was the one thing I had to turn off in order to enable the DD. It now sounds like everything is as it should (just ran my DVE test disc through again with stellar results).
