Io just bought the Lg LH-E9674 abd I can only get surround whiel watching movies. I hooked up the hd cables and an optical cable from the xbox 360 to the dvd/reciever and nothing and I tried hooking up components from my direct tv box to the reciever and nothing. I know I'm doing something wrong. Should I get the thing that allows you to hook up 2 HDMI cables to a box and push a swithbetween the two? If I do that then what about the 360? Am I hooking things up in the wrong place? Someone please help!

A couple of things...

As far as your DTV goes, are you using an optical or digital coax cable? If you are, then are you sure that the program you are watching has dolby 5.1 audio? If not your receiver may be converting it to pro logic, or just leaving it stereo.

For the xbox, do you need to enable surround sound in one of the menus? also, are you sure the game youre playing has surround sound?

It's an opical cable and I kow it won't be suriund on all shows, but I should be abel to make the news come out of the front 2 speakers if I wanted to. Th xbox360 is set to digital 5.1 surround so I'm not sure what the deal is. I just don't think I have the connections right. Any more ideas please?

ok, so you have an optical going from your 360 to your AVR, right? on the HDAV cable for you xbox there should be a switch for HDTV or Standard (mine does)...try flipping it and see what happens, it may think that you *must* have and hdtv to get surround sound...I wouldnt put a idiotic move like this past Microsoft :p

Also...what tells you, you are not in surround mode? Your AVR should be displaying what mode it is in? Have you physically gone up to one of your surround speakers and listen for anything?

Also...if you run your audio as well as your video through your AVR then make sure your optical is going into the same bank as your video. For instance, on my onkyo receiver it has:
Video 1 In
Video 2 In
and it has
Optical 1
Optical 2

the optical should be the same as the video.

As a last result, if you havent tried this already, completely take apart your setup, disconnect all cables, and work on getting just one device to function the way it should be, that may take some of the confusion out of it, and once you get that one right, you should know how to get the others right as well.

Hope this helps pal.

ok, so you have an optical going from your 360 to your AVR, right? on the HDAV cable for you xbox there should be a switch for HDTV or Standard (mine does)...try flipping it and see what happens, it may think that you *must* have and hdtv to get surround sound...I wouldnt put a idiotic move like this past Microsoft :p

No, you do not need to set your 360 to HDTV.

I'm not sure about the rest.

Ok, are you getting sound at all?

To get sound from the optical in you have to goto Aux one and then hit the "D Input" button once or twice, it will flip between digital coax and optical.

Now you should be hearing sound (or you may have already been here).

Now hit the XTS pro button to XTS-P on.

You should be getting ss now.

If not try the audio button and goto PL II Movie.

Should most def get SS from the 360 optical.

DO you have the rca's pluged in and the optical (you should only need one)

I dont know if for example, you had the 360 rca's going to your tv and the optical to the LH-E9674 what would happen.