Here's what I'm using:

Samsung 650 series LCD TV
Onkyo TX-SR606 Receiver
Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-Ray player

I've got the blu-ray player connected to the receiver with an HDMI cable. The receiver is connected to the TV with another HDMI cable.

The problem:

Whenever I watch a blu-ray movie, I hear a noise coming from all of my speakers. This noise is a fuzzy, crackling sound. It gets louder/softer, depending on the volume setting.

The sound remains when I've paused the movie.

The sound remains underneath all other sound coming from the movie, so that when there's a scene with little or no sound in the movie, I can hear this "speaker noise."

This "speaker noise" does not occur when I'm watching/listening to any other device (cable, CD player, or X-Box).

I've also noticed that when I listen to Pandora through my blu-ray player, the speaker noise disappears.

I've unplugged the cable box's power to see if that was causing some sort of interference, but that didn't help.


Any idea on what could be causing this?

This is the weird part to me:
I've also noticed that when I listen to Pandora through my blu-ray player, the speaker noise disappears.

That suggests something with the internals of the player, only affecting discs. Does it affect DVDs? Can you try plugging in some standard analog audio cables to see if it still happens?

Unfortunately, I got rid of all my other cables when I upgraded to HDMI.

I rearranged the HDMI cables this morning by plugging the one that went to the cable box into the blu-ray player and vice versa while keeping the same connections at the receiver, and the same thing happened: noise when playing discs.

There's a noise when I play DVDs, too, but it's a little softer. When I pause the movie and turn up the volume all the way, it's much softer but still there.

I haven't done an exhaustive study, but it seems that a blu-ray like the Avengers is much worse than some family drama when it comes to the noise.

At this point, I'm thinking of just buying a new blu-ray player. If that doesn't work, getting a new receiver.

Well, it sounds like the player is doing something wrong when using discs, rather than anything from the receiver. Whether that comes from the motor that spins them or from something in the digital audio circuitry (DSP) would be the question. You could next try changing the settings around in the player. Switch from Bitstream to PCM or vice versa, see what happens to this noise. If it changes, it could be the DSP, and maybe you could survive for a bit with a different decoding process.

But if that is electrical noise from the motor failing, it's probably most cost effective to replace the whole unit.

Thanks, Spiky. That did the trick. I switched my blu-ray player to bistream (audiophile) and the noise goes away.

How much quality will I be losing while I use bitstream for the time being? I'm assuming that there will be some loss, but not much.

Thanks again. Time to start looking for a new blu-ray player.

Shouldn't really be any difference. Bitstream means your receiver is now decoding the Dolby or DTS, the player is just passing it thru. There isn't a whole lot of difference in the DSPs available on the market for that first decoding step, and your receiver has always been handling the more important 2nd step, converting from digital to analog, so that won't change at all.

Ah, that makes sense. Do you think the bitstream method will eventually have the speaker noise?

It's certainly possible. I'm not an expert on the fine details of how these internal parts work, but I think the signal is still running through some of the same chips. If they are partially broken, it's not a stretch to imagine more issues.

Thanks again, Spiky.

No problem.