Im trying to get sound from my cable box to my tv Thru the reciever. I have a motorola cable box . I do not have my speakers yet so I just wanted to test running everything threw the reciever. Does that make sense?

Okay Sean, purpose understood(no separate speakers yet), but the connections made are still a bit unclear(HDMI/optical?). Assuming that you do have the correct HDMI connections, if you want to send sound through your TV speakers rather than a separate speaker system, you have to set the HDMI sound in the AV setup menu to "Through".

Yea I have hdmi running to the tv and composite and optical running to the reciever. I have through set and still no sound.

fireforge, i cannot say what connections you have on the back of your cable box, but check to see that the 'hdmi' to the tv is not coming out of the cable box as a 'dvi' format.
Our newly acquired HD sat box has a dvi out BUT the setup included a dvi to hdmi connector for the output to the tv. That's fine for the video, but dvi does not carry audio. Even the setup guy overlooked this when he was here. Had us puzzled as to why we had video but no sound with the 'hdmi' connection.

If you don’t have your speakers yet, then why are you routing anything through the receiver? I’d just run cables from the sat receiver to the TV direct until you get your speakers.

My thoughts exactly, it doesn't sound like the reciever is driving anything.

If I understand you correctly, the only connection from the cable box is component and optical, and the only connection to the TV is HDMI. If that's the case, you're lucky you're getting video, much less audio! I'd guess the designers of the Pioneer figured there was no reason to convert audio out of the (primarily) audio device and send it to the video device, so it doesn't convert from optical to whatever the audio component of HDMI is. I'm surprised it converts from component video to HDMI video.

Just a stray thought. Receivers have settings/setup menus that require you to assign the connection. Have you gone into the setup menu on the receiver and applied the correct setting there? Check your manual for the details, but I'm guessing this could be the problem.

Sean, I did say "assuming that you have the correct HDMI connectionS". As Ken pointed out, your clarification on your connections establishes that you don't; you have no HDMI(or even DVI)connection from your cable box at all. Although the audio carried by the optical cable is digital, as is the video which a HDMI cable carries, that doesn't mean that that the digital audio can simply be added to the digital video and both be carried by HDMI. The formats are different and the digital audio would have to be transcoded into a form which could use HDMI. I recall there are a couple separate units to do this, but don't know that any receiver does. So, unless your cable box has an HDMI output(and chess and Royce indicate that it may not; DVI doesn't carry audio), you won't get sound on the HDMI input on your TV. You'd have to use one of the other inputs for sound.

What may have misled you is the fact that your 74TXVi does "convert" the composite video input to a digital output that HDMI can use and a picture resulted. You may have thought that something similar applied to the audio, but it doesn't. Incidentally, if you do mean the single cable composite video rather than the three cable component video, that's the poorest of the commonly used connections. The fact that it's carried on HDMI doesn't improve its quality in any way, and it's still at the composite video level. Better would be to use a DVI/HDMI cable out of the box(if in fact it does use a DVI output)into the 74 for video. Alternatively, S-video or component connections would be better if you do have composite now.