Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners HDMI vs Optical audio

What's your brand of AVR? Some of the entry level early AVR's with HDMI connections did not pass audio through HDMI, only the video. If this is the case allowing the player to decode the audio will NOT work either because the AVR would not be able to pass audio through HDMI.

If your receiver has 5.1 or 7.1 multichannel analog connections and so does your Blu-ray than you will be able to receive the lossless codecs such as DTS Master-HD and Dolby True-HD.

You would need to run 4 pairs of these cables (7.1) OR 3 pairs for 5.1.

http://www.monoprice.com/products/produc...=1&format=2

from your receiver to blu-ray player. I know for Denon AVR's to switch to multichannel analog you go to EXT.IN. For speaker setup and bass management you do it through the BR player settings.

My AVR is a Harman Kardon 645, its about 5 years old, it has both HDMI and 7.1 analog with speaker management and eq settings built in

It seems like the 645 can at least pass audio through HDMI at the very minimum from by brief search. The model below the 645 cannot. Now the question what is the make and model # of your Blu-ray player?

BR is a Samsung Bd-6500

OK great.

You have two options. Option one might work (as I'm not 100% sure about the AVR and its hdmi processing) and option 2 which will work for sure. According to this link your Blu-ray player can internally decode the lossless formats and also supports 7.1 multichannel analog.

http://www.samsung.com/us/video/blu-ray-dvd/BD-C6500/XAA-specs

Option 1 (HDMI):Read posts 4 and 5.

Option 2 Follow the steps regarding multi-channel analog above (this option will work 100%)

awesome...thank you for your help

Just to be clear HD Audio is only from Blu Ray discs.

Got it, I think my confusion was in the HK's lack of ability to decode not realizing that thr BR is already doing it and the HK is simply amplifying and dibursing the already decoded sound??

Did you get it working?

Like what Jakewash said, the hd formats such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master are only supported by Blu-ray disks.

Regular DVD's will still decode as Dolby Digital or DTS or perhaps very old movies, tv on DVD just in stereo.

I havent had time to get everything hooked up yet but thanks to all the help from the great people on this forum i am confident that I have the best scenario figured out. I also took the advice here and ordered a universal remote which I can see will certainly make things a lot easier. Thank you to everyone here for the good advice. It can all seem so complicated sometimes.