I have a optical running from my CD player to my reciever as well as RCA's. So I was curious today and unplugged my RCA's and sure enough, NO SOUND! I have been under the impression that optical cable carries sound?! NO? What does it do?

I have an optical port on the back of my HD cable box and one on the back of my TV (Sony 46V2500 LCD)

Can someone help me wit this?

Thanks

You usually need to tell the receiver what input to use.

You usually need to tell the receiver what input to use.

How do I do that?

Depends on your receiver. Check the manual. The optical cable streams the digital signal off the CD directly to your receiver so you don't have any chance of signal degredation due to analog cabling. This is a good thing, although depending on your setup/ears you may or may not notice a difference. For CDs that's the only benefit, but for DVDs it can carry Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 as well, which is definitely a good thing. :D

Make and model AV receiver?

Make and model AV receiver?

It's old. Yamaha HTR 5560. It has multiple optical ports but I cannot figure out how to use any of them! I'm an idiot with this stuff though! :rolleyes:

Most of the Yamahas auto-sense which input has a signal on it and pick the optical port if more than one signal is active. So when you had both optical and RCA cables attached, it should have been sensing the signal on both inputs and choosing the optical port. When you removed the optical cable it would then sense that only the RCA input was active and use that one.

You should be able to manually scroll the inputs by pressing the input button again. For example, if you had an optical cable and a digital coax and analog RCA cables connected to the "CD" input, the first press of the "CD" button should cause the receiver to use the optical port, the second press will be the coax cable, the third press the analog RCA and the four press will be back to the optical cable.

At least that's how it works on my old 995 Yamaha.

Most of the Yamahas auto-sense which input has a signal on it and pick the optical port if more than one signal is active. So when you had both optical and RCA cables attached, it should have been sensing the signal on both inputs and choosing the optical port. When you removed the optical cable it would then sense that only the RCA input was active and use that one.

You should be able to manually scroll the inputs by pressing the input button again. For example, if you had an optical cable and a digital coax and analog RCA cables connected to the "CD" input, the first press of the "CD" button should cause the receiver to use the optical port, the second press will be the coax cable, the third press the analog RCA and the four press will be back to the optical cable.

At least that's how it works on my old 995 Yamaha.

Awsome, I'm going to try that right now!

OK well that worked, When I pressed "CD" a few times each time in said: Auto-DTS or analog. However I only got sound from Analog! Maybe my optical ports dont work on my Reciever? Because this also does not work for my TV either!

does your CD player have any kind of menu to select the optical out port ? DVD players always need a menu change to select digital output, but I'm not sure about a pure CD player

Correct me if I'm wrong.....but do audio CD's even carry digital sound encoding ?????

PCM stereo?

PCM stereo?

?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

My receiver is not a Yamaha, but the optical inputs were "generic." They had to be assigned to named inputs (DSB, DVD or CD, etc) in a setup menu. That would certainly vary by brand and you'd have to read manual. But it's a one time thing.

It probably only matters on sources that can route 5 channel sound to receiver, but that includes the TV, the PVR, and the DVD player for me.

Today I got my Oppo 981 DVD player and my Monoprice HDMI cable for my STB so I was messing around with the cables and realized I can run an optical to my reciever from the Oppo so even though it's hooked up to the Tv via HDMI I still ran the optical to my DVD input of my reciever and it sounds incredible.. No kidding, I could clearly tell the difference in sound quality and the bass was intense, actually had to turn down the subwoofer. Thanks for the help!