No audio through receiver with new monitor

First off, I wanted to express my appreciation for all you AVS people. I've been to this site multiple times for troubleshooting and have generally found the most insight here.

The transition from my old 720p LCD TV (the LT26HVX) to my new 1080p LCD monitor is making the receiver not play audio through its speakers.

My setup:

• PC: Windows 7 x64, nVidia GT 240, HDMI out
• Pioneer VSX-819H-K receiver
• Syntax Olevia LT26HVX (old LCD TV, ca. 2005)
• Samsung 2494LW (new monitor)

In both cases, PC>(HDMI)>Receiver>(HDMI>DVI adapter)>TV/Monitor.

I tried several things I found by Googling:

• Disabled Realtek HD onboard audio in the BIOS after deleting corresponding drivers. No effect.
• Used Driver Cleaner. No effect.
• Deleted/uninstalled/reinstalled nVidia drivers (the latest version, 1.0.9.1). If I do this, the audio device disappears altogether from the Playback Devices list, even though the nVidia HDMI audio devices remain in the Device Manager.
• Changed HDMI outputs on receiver. No effect.
• Can't make the HDMI audio the default output since it's either "not plugged in" or completely missing.
• Drivers and BIOS are all up-to-date.
• Monitor is set to standard resolution (1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz)
• Receiver is set to AMP setting, rather than passthrough (THRU)

Having exhausted the search for computer problems, I tried switching back and forth between the old TV and the new monitor while the computer was running. The receiver would put out audio with the old TV, but not with the new monitor (showing the audio device, again, "not plugged in"). So I'm pretty sure it's not a computer issue, rather a problem between the receiver and monitor. But plenty of people use receivers and monitors together without problems. Right?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[WORKAROUND] If you have both DVI and HDMI outputs, the DVI connection can be used for the monitor and the HDMI connection for the receiver:

PC>(DVI)>Monitor, and
PC>(HDMI)>Receiver

The receiver will be treated as a second monitor, so to avoid the extended ghost desktop go to Display settings and set to "Duplicate Displays." Trying to turn off the receiver "monitor" will result in losing the audio.

[SOLUTION] The source of the problem appears to be a lack of any extension block (with the necessary descriptors) in the Pioneer receiver's EDID.

The problem can be rectified with an EDID override. Using an INF file with an appended extension block taken from a similar receiver fixes the problem. In this case, any INF from a Pioneer receiver seems to be adequate, and receivers from other manufacturers gave audio but messed up video.

I took the INF from a Pioneer VSX-1019AH that Tulli posted towards the bottom of this thread and modified it. The modified INF file is posted here (Attachment 176965). It's a txt file for uploading purposes, simply change the extension to make it an INF file.

 

Samsung 2494LW + Pioneer VSX-819H-K.txt 2.9404296875k . file

Thanks for the reply.

I have the monitor set at 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz, and I tried 1280 x 720 too just to make sure the resolution wasn't a problem. I should've mentioned that, but I forgot (it was a long and grueling night!).

Regarding the problem you had, I had that same problem trying to get 1366 x 768 out of the GT 240 with my old 720p TV, but I came to the conclusion that the problem was the receiver. I've read that some receivers, if not most or all, only use the audio from signals in a standard format. Are you using a receiver, or were you able to confirm that the GT 240 was the culprit?

No, definitely not. Sorry if I wasn't clear - I'm looking to get audio from the receiver through its speakers, not from the monitor. When I was using the LCD TV, I had the speakers off and was using the receiver for audio, so nothing has changed in that regard.

Thanks for the observation, I somehow missed that option when I was looking through them! Unfortunately, it's already set to AMP. I tried the passthrough setting too just for the heck of it, and of course it doesn't help.

I'm beginning to think that too. If that's the case, could I fix it with an EDID override? I'm learning about doing that now.

Cleared out everything, still no audio.

These:

Attachment 176772

If I disable the onboard audio in the BIOS, it just removes the latter two items.

Thanks for the suggestion, Davin! I now get digital audio and video using the alternate connection scheme:

PC>(DVI)>Monitor, and
PC>(HDMI)>Receiver

Of course, the computer then wanted to send video to the receiver, which means I had an extended desktop off to the right of my monitor. If I turned off that display by setting "Desktop only on 2" (the monitor), then the audio would stop working. But if I set the displays to duplicate, it seems to work fine.

It doesn't seem like running in duplicate display mode hurts gaming performance, at least not significantly.

Thanks again to everyone for all your help!

For the benefit of anyone else with this problem who doesn't have the luxury of DVI and HDMI output (and because I'm an engineer at heart, if not by training), I would like to nail down where the incompatibility is here.

When I was looking at EDID override solutions, I used MonInfo to look at the EDID from the monitor, the receiver, and the coagulate version when I had them hooked up in the original fashion. They are attached here as txt files:
Attachment 176891, Attachment 176892, Attachment 176893

I noticed a few things:

• The Pioneer receiver's EDID was strange. It reported the native resolution as 1080i @ 30 Hz even though it's capable of 1080p, and had nothing to say about audio. There were no extension blocks.
• The Samsung monitor EDID had an extension block which stated clearly that there was no audio support, as walford suspected. I guessed that this was the culprit, and that if I did an EDID override with that line taken out or some other modification, I could fix the problem. However...
• With the full original hookup, the coagulate EDID reported by MonInfo didn't have this extension block. It looked more like the Pioneer EDID with some of the information changed by the Samsung monitor (native resolution, etc).
• Installing a monitor driver from an INF as collected from the Pioneer, Samsung, or the full connection didn't fix the problem.

I found several threads dealing with modifying the INF to reach a certain end, but I couldn't figure out how to do it myself. I am unsure if an EDID override would even work at all. If I understand correctly, the Pioneer receiver itself reads and processes the Samsung EDID info before passing it along to the nVidia card. Is it possible that because of the "No audio" line from the Samsung, it just decides to give up?

If that's the case, then it seems that an EDID override would be pointless. Can anyone with more expertise in this give an opinion?

 

Pioneer VSX-819H-K.txt 2.2099609375k . file

 

Samsung 2494LW.txt 2.9140625k . file

 

Combined.txt 2.2099609375k . file

Update:

I've been working on EDID overrides when I have time. Since the Pioneer's extension block is empty and the audio SADs are missing, I supposed that the best course of action would be manually adding an extension block from an appropriate receiver to the INF that I have.

I grabbed some INFs from other receivers on the EDID Override thread, unfortunately I couldn't find any for a Pioneer receiver. I took the extension blocks and put them into the full setup EDID INF that I had created. Without any further modification. As soon as I installed the INF, the HDMI audio showed up as "Ready," even though I didn't get any sound. So apparently it is the missing audio SADs after all!

When I restarted, the sound came on, but the colors on the screen would be badly messed up. I tried this with two different INFs that I pulled down from that thread with the same results. I'm guessing that the audio SADs were adequate to fix the original audio problem, but some of the other descriptors were messing up the video.

Right now I'm trying to splice together the DTDs from the Samsung monitor (since it had an extension block) with the appropriate SADs from one of the INFs I pulled down. At this point I've successfully added the audio CEA block (that is, EDID Manager views it as being a coherent block), but the INF didn't fix the audio problem. I'm supposing that the INF has to have the CEA video block and the vendor description as well for the whole thing to work...?

Tulli - if I can't get this figured out relatively soon I might ask for your help in getting the INF modified correctly. Thanks for volunteering.

I followed the instructions in the EDID Override thread, in which you take the receiver EDID without anything else hooked up. And there's no extension block coming from the Pioneer. I think this is the fundamental problem.

Thanks for posting the Pioneer EDIDs. I had just found one that works, but the one you posted from the 1019 should be closer to mine. I'll put the Samsung DTDs in (I assume it's best to have the monitor DTDs rather than a receiver's) and post the result for posterity.

The fact that you have an EDID for a 1019 makes me think that my unit is uniquely faulty in its lack of an extension block, or that they didn't put in the appropriate EDID for the lower model 819.

Using the extension block from the Pioneer VSX-1019AH that you posted, I put in the Samsung DTDs and changed the speaker allocation (don't know if it matters, but I figured I'd put it in). It works! I will post it with a revision in the original post.

I think that at some point I should probably try to contact Pioneer about it. I don't know if they'll care, but we'll see.

Thanks again for all the help!