Why does my pre-pro say that I am receiving 5.1, when in some instances, like The Tonight Show in HD and while watching Threshold on UniHD, I am getting no center output?

Your stations aren't mixing it right ?

Besides - Dolby Digital does NOT always mean 5.1

Nothing is stoping the audio engineer from puting NO AUDIO in the center or surround channels. It's a very common and bad practice. But I wish that if they only mix into the L&R that they would just make it a DD 2.0 signal. Then Dolby PL IIx would give me the center and surrounds. Instead, I need to switch the audio to 2 channel PCM to get center and surrounds.

Ed

Hmmm.........I wonder how I could do that. I have a Lex MC-1 and a Dish ViP 722 receiver. I cannot take an incoming DD signal and play it back as PCM. Wonder how I can do that.

Is your center speaker output during any other program? Make sure you have the center speaker connected correctly.

System is fine. It only happens on certain programs on UniHD, like the earlier productions of Threshold, and on The Tonight Show.

Universal HD, like other NBC properties, runs in 5.1 mode full time and has nothing in the center or surrounds when airing programming that originates in 2.0. This has been happening since the Olympics 2 years ago. The only way you can work around this is to plug in the analog stereo (red/white) cables and use your receiver's DPL processing to put the sound back in the center channel.

Ah...........thanks. I thought that might be the answer. Right now, I'm just using a toslink connection between the SAT Tuner and my pre-pro.

I was hoping there was some other solution because getting to my gear to hook up the RCA's is gonna be a pain.

I can't believe that The Tonight Show, which has a great HD PQ feed comes in in 2.0.

Thanks for the input...........(a bit of a play on words)

I can't believe that The Tonight Show, which has a great HD PQ feed comes in in 2.0.

Believe it. The Tonight Show production staff has no desire to do anything other than stereo.

Isn't it possible to set either your A/V receiver or your ATSC receiver output to PCM ? That should accomplish the same thing as using the Audio RCA jacks...

Isn't it possible to set either your A/V receiver or your ATSC receiver output to PCM ? That should accomplish the same thing as using the Audio RCA jacks...

With only the optical inputs used on my pre-pro, I can receive and process a PCM signal only IF that signal is a PCM signal. If, however, a signal is a Dolby Digital signal, I cannot tell my pre-pro to process that DD signal as a PCM signal. The only way to do that is to hook up the analog RCA's ALONG with the Opticals on the same input, go into the pre-pro's set up menu and change the input from Optical to Analog, which I have done, and it's all good now.

Believe me, I tried every setting that I could think of on the pre-pro as well as the Sat Receiver to no avail. Had to hook up the RCA analog cables to make it all work right.

Hmmm.........I wonder how I could do that. I have a Lex MC-1 and a Dish ViP 722 receiver.

Believe me, I tried every setting that I could think of on the pre-pro as well as the Sat Receiver to no avail.
I guess that's a limitation of your Dish STB. I would have thought that you could simply change the digital audio output from DD to PCM. My box allows that.

Ed

Yes - all the Standard Def Dish receivers with TOSLINK allow that option as well - you can do PCM only, DD only , or both. In the OP's case - he would probably want to select PCM only for this channel / source.

Yes - all the Standard Def Dish receivers with TOSLINK allow that option as well - you can do PCM only, DD only , or both. In the OP's case - he would probably want to select PCM only for this channel / source.

I know that the software allows me to pick either PCM only, DD only or both, but it makes absolutly no difference which one of those boxes I check. I know it should, but it doesn't.

I am not running on HDMI. Maybe that is why, no?