Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Using the USB port on your Pioneer Elite AVR?

I'll post here because I didn't get any responses on AVS.

I have a 45TX and I've hooked up my PC to it via USB. I use my 42" plasma as the monitor. I've noticed that the sound is very "tinny" from the PC. Is this normal? I'm curious if anyone else has found the same thing to be true.

BTW, I'm using M22's.

Cesar, I don't have the 45TX, so I can't specifically comment on its USB input port; however I do use the USB output from my laptop to feed classical music streamed from stations all over the world into one of my receivers, using the Xitel Hi-Fi Link connection. The quality of streaming audio isn't the highest to begin with, but for example when I compared the quality of a local station received over the air with the streamed signal of the same station there was just the usual quality loss because of the reduced bandwidth. So, although you didn't describe what material that you were listening to, my thought would be that since the USB to USB connection is a straight digital one, that the USB shouldn't degrade whatever quality is available originally in the source material.

True, I should clarify what I was listening to.

Actually it was the normal windows beeps that seemed very tinny. Also, I use the setup to show my daughter's kid's CDs. On our desktop w/ Cambridgeworks speakers, the sound is fine. But using that same cd on the home theatre, the sound is not as good.

I've got the 55TXi, and just recently converted all of my CDs to MP3s. So last week I hooked up my notebook via the USB to the 55TXi, and I was very pleased with the results. But this was just a couple of hours of casual listening, and was more enamored with having my entire collection available as a jukebox! Way cool.

Anyhow, I'm planning on sitting down and listening to comparisons btw the original CDs and the MP3s (I used LAME), and see if I'm truly happy with the final product. But it appeared to work fairly well, and there were no immediately obvious audio defects.

Didn't listen to any Windows sounds or anything else.

Take care,
Rich

Good point. I tried my laptop w/ MP3's before and didn't notice the problem.

Could be a problem w/ either the desktop's specific USB port or the fact that windows sounds are horrible. Something to check...