"Official" Sony STR-DA3600, 4600, 5600ES Receiver thread - Page 3

I have just purchased a Sony STR-5600ES A/V receiver and I believe I have it set up correctly to properly decode the audio from Blu-ray movies. When I select a 7.1 Master DTS-Audio encoded movie, I do see that 7.1 channels are active on the 5600ES display, but I see 48 KHz L-PCM as the audio. I am using HDMI out from the Sony 7600 Blu-ray player into the 5600ES. The sound is terrific, but I am concerned that L-PCM is not what I should be seeing in the receiver's display. (I expected to see DTS -Master Audio displayed). Can anyone who owns or is familiar with this receiver let me know whether this is correct or do I have some setting wrong?

Thanks in advance for responding.

Tom

Just go into settings of your Bluray player under Audio and tweak them; read posts above as well I think a similar question has been addressed before.

Hi TomWheeler, as vaiofreak posted its the bluray player setting. Check HDMI Audio is set to "Auto" and BD Audio (Mix) is set to "Direct" or "Off".

Also note sometimes a Blu Ray disc will default to the standard DD/DTS track, so you might have to manually select the TrueHD/DTS-MA soundtrack. Normally this will be found under Audio or Language Setting.

Hi JChin,

Thank you so much for your directions on properly setting DTS-Mas HD and Dolby True HD playback form Blu-ray discs. I had HDMI Audio set to Auto. My problem was that I had BD Audio (Mix) set to on (apparently a default setting on the Sony 7600 as I had not previously set that parameter. I turned BD (Mix) to Off, and the receiver correctly shows that it is decoding a 7.1 channel DTS-Master HD audio stream.

The 5600ES is my first Sony A/V receiver after having owned Pioneer and Integra receivers for years. There is a lot to like about this receiver, but the manual for it and the Sony 7600ES Blu-ray player are much less clear than they could be on certain items.

Again thank you so kindly for your help.

Tom

I am using the Sony 5600ES receiver in a home theater that has six NHT Absolute Zero speakers (nominal impedance according to NHT of 6 ohms) and one NHT 2C center speaker (nominal impedance of 8 ohms according to NHT). In the speaker set-up menu of the Sony receiver I only have the option of selecting either 4 or 8 ohms for the speaker impedance. Which should I select? Can either the NHT speakers or the Sony receiver be damaged by selecting 4 ohms in the speaker settings of the Sony receiver?

Tom

Its really a power issue. You wont damage anything and the 5600 has enough power to rattle your teeth. I would leave it on 8 ohms as generally it will protect the amp better and match your center and won't damage the speakers.
Enjoy your receiver.

Roseng,

Thanks for the response. Your advice was confirmed by tech support people at NHT who recommended setting the Sony receiver's impedance at 8 ohms and only lowering it to 4 ohms if I needed a louder volume level. We have U-verse and a few of the news channels have a rather low audio signal requiring me to turn up the volume control on the Sony 5600ES to about -10 dB to get an adequate volume level. However, on Blu-ray and other sources I run the Sony at about -22 dB volume level and get plenty of output from the NHT's.

Tom

I just bought a STR-DA5600ES. The Sony auto calibration wants to set all the speakers to large including the surrounds/rears. But I don't want to do that and instead want to set all the speakers up as small and select the crossover frequencies for towers, center, and surrounds/rears. No matter what I do (including turning on or off all the sound processing functions) I get more bass output out of the subwoofer by selecting large for my speakers. Even if I use the highest crossover frequency (200 Hz) for all my speakers and set them all to small - the bass output from subwoofer is significantly lower. Does anyone know why the crossover function to subwoofer doesn't seem to work at all in this receiver? In fact it is the opposite of expected with less bass from sub when all the speakers are set to small.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve

I have recently purchased the 3600ES. Great receiver! I have two questions. Is it possible to remap the outputs so that instead of pressing HDMI 1 to access my cable box and HDMI 2 to access my BD Player I could just press the SAT/CATV or BD buttons and have it go to those modes and have those modes look at the HDMI ins instead of the default? And my second question is I have a few movie on blu ray The Town for example is encoded in DTS HD, however when I play the move on the receiver display it displays the audio as Linear PCM 48KHz,' is that correct? I thought it would have scrolled DTS-HD 3/2.1 or something like that across the display.

Thanks

I figured out part of the answer to my question. The crossover function of the receiver works OK with Blu-ray and Super Audio CD. But there seems to be no way to get it to work with a regular CD (the sub plays louder with speakers set to large). Any ideas?

Hi Steve Mehs, if the receiver displays "Linear PCM 48KHz" then the BD player is doing the decoding and not the receiver. Check BD player audio mix setting is turned "Off".

Awesome! Thanks, that was it much apperciated.

Thats one thing down. Anyone have any thoughts on the input remapping? Also, for some reason, while I have no problems streaming my music collection from my PC on the receiver, for some reason the album artwork won't display.

I had to turn off IP control, HDMI passthrough (while AVR is off) and the always-on network functions. After that it draws zero watts according to my "kill-a-watt"... which means it's in the single digits in reality.

I'm currently having issues with my older 3500ES receiver and I figured I should upgrade to a 3d receiver now. Certain movies from my blu ray collection are going to a black screen for 1 to 2 seconds in the middle of the movie, I was occasionally getting audio dropouts and the sound was out of sync for no reason. The first time I witnessed these issues was when I purchased the BDP-S770 and paired it with the the 3500ES. Keep in mind, prior to this, the S570 was paired up with the receiver and I NEVER had issues. Luckily I still have my older BP-S570 which I moved upstairs to watch movies in my bedroom. Anyhow, I returned the BDP-S770 back to Sony for full refund since it was within the 30 day return policy. When I connected the S570 to the receiver, I figured I needed to test the player to make sure I would not have any issues similar to the 770. So I decided to pop in "Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black" and to my surprise, the movie switched to black screen for 1 to 2 seconds about 32 minutes into the movie. I was so disapointed, because I knew it had to be the receiver that was problematic and NOT the blu ray players. At this point, I would rather send the 3500ES to Sony and get it fixed, because of the 5 year warranty, but I don't know how long that's going to take. Is it a hassle to return something like this to Sony?

My question is; Has anyone had any issues with the newer STR-DA3600ES receiver? Have you experienced anything similiar to what I have experienced on the 3500ES?

Have your tried swapping to another HDMI cable and resetting the receiver to factory defaults? This might solve your problems...

BTW, I was told the HDMI cables could also be to blame and not the receiver. I have Sonic Wave HDMI cables that I bought in 2007 from Cablestogo.com and they were almost $100 each. Sonic Wave is known to make good quality cables. I've never had issues with blu ray discs experiencing audio dropouts and going to a black screen until recently. Is it possible the cables went bad?

NORLL,
I was typing away as you posted your response and did not read it until now. No I have not swapped it out with another HDMI cable. I did reset to factory default yesterday. I don't have a cable that is long enough to try this, the other cables i'm using in other rooms are 6 ft long. Im gonna have to get some long cheap cables to try this. As mentioned before, the Sonic Wave cables I have now were expensive and are almost 4 years old. Can HDMI cables go bad after some time?

I couldn't say. HDMI is complicated and the margins for errors are small. I would recommend you to try other cables (buy some cheap ones for testing) and reset the receiver to factory defaults (this is easily done, check the manual). Also reset the Blu-ray player and update the firmware for both (if possible). You should also swap the cable to the TV and perhaps also do a reset to factory defaults.

I would recommend you to do these things just to be sure everything is okay at your end. If you have the receiver sent in for repair, they might not find the issue with their test equipment.

Even so, there might be anomalies caused by use (connecting/disconnecting or bending cables). Unfortunately HDMI is not very robust when it comes to handling errors. This might or might not be the source of your troubles.

To be honest, the more I think about it, I'd rather not buy a new receiver now and wait a little while for new 3d tvs to hit stores. It would be nice if I could find the problem with my current receiver soon. I'll be getting some cheap HDMI cables a see what happens.

I have a 5500ES and have yet to figure out how to get the album art to display. Has anyone successfully figured out how to get the album art to display on the 5500 or 5600?

Display album art... the art has to be named "folder.jpg", not sure any other image format will work (no .png, no .bmp, etc.). The art has to be in the same folder with the tracks. If you put the art in a separate folder from the tracks, it won't be found. There may be a limit on the size of image that will work... I know 500x500 and smaller works, not sure about larger sizes than 500x500.

This worked for me having music organized in alphabetical folders by Artist name first, then by album title, and all the tracks and cover art inside the album title folder. Example: 1.5 TB hard disc, Folder named "L", artist folder named "Los Lobos", album folder named "Los Lobos - 1999 - Kiko" and inside that folder are the 10 album tracks and the cover art named "folder.jpg". All tracks are tagged, but tagging with album art doesn't seem to make it show up in a lot of places, you have to have the actual image file named folder.jpg . If you dump 50 tracks from 50 different albums into a single folder, you can't have 50 cover art images all named folder.jpg so you won't be able to get cover art.

Please help - I'm curious if anyone else has a problem with Dolby True HD. I have a STR-DA5600ES receiver and Sony BDP-1700ES Blu-ray player. PCM uncompressed and DTS-MA Blu-rays are fantastic on my system and sound similar as expected. But when I play a Dolby True HD disc the sound is about 10 dB less and I have to crank up the subwoofer all the way up to get significant sound from the woofer. The sound is also less dynamic. It doesn't matter if I have the decoding done by the Blu-ray player or the receiver. This problem with Dolby True HD holds true for all the Blu-rays I've tried including the codec samplings on the Muncil & Spears disc.
I'm hoping some of the gurus on this thread know the answer.
Thanks,
Steve

Interesting forum. This is the first forum I have ever joined and I am a new home theater owner. After 5 posts with no response from any of you (not even to say "I don't know" or "what a stupid question") I won't post another one. It seems quite rude and unfriendly to me. Oh well. I have been solving most of my issues without your help. I just figured why Dolby True HD doesn't work well on the 5600ES using the receiver default settings. It needs a specific tweak. But I don't feel at all inclined to say what the fix is. Have a nice day.

@stevoid1: I don't know the answer to your question. I have the DA5600 and I have not noticed any problems with DD True HD. There was neither any problems mentioned in the thorough review of the 5600ES in the Widescreen Review. Have you tried updating the firmware to all units and resetting them to factory defaults? Both receiver (I don't know if there is new firmware for it) and player?

Norll,
Thanks for the reply (takk for svare?). I figured out the answer to my problem after listening to the audio codec samplings on Muncil & Spears. The problem is dynamic compression. The 5600ES receiver default setting for dynamic compression is AUTO. On AUTO, Linear PCM and DTS-MA sound identical to my ears; however, Dolby True HD is severely compressed. I turned off dynamic compression in the 5600ES and that fixed it. I haven't tried the STD setting for dynamic compression. I live in a house and can make as much noise as I want and don't like dynamic compression. The compression with Dolby True HD was so marked that I had to turn the volume up 10 dB and crank the subwoofer up to max to get the volume up to similar to LPCM - and then the loud but compressed sound is flat and obviously not dynamic - obnoxious. Now with dynamic compression turned off all my Dolby True HD Blu-rays discs sound as good as those with PCM uncompressed audio tracks. I also turned off dynamic compression in the Blu-ray player although that probably wouldn't matter unless you use the Blu-ray player to decode the disc. Since this weekend I have noticed complaints on other forums about severe dynamic range compression with Dolby True HD with other brands of receivers, so it appears to be a "problem" with Dolby True HD. People who live in apartments or don't want to bother neighbors or others in the house may prefer this dynamic compression but for me it ruins the effect of the sound track.
Since initially posting this I have been unable to reproduce severe dynamic compression with Dolby True HD unless the receiver setting for dynamic compression is set to MAX. I also learned (most of you probably know this) that dynamic compression only works with Dolby and not with PCM or DTS-MA. Anyway, I just turn off dynamic compression since I don't have to worry about bothering the neighbors.
Med vennlig hilsen,
Steve

Great. Thanks for the info Doug. I will give it a try and see how it works.

Doug Blackburn,
I read your well written review of the 5600ES in Widescreen Review. It was really helpful - especially the recommendation to use the Engineer mode. I have my 5600ES set up and working well. When I do the autocalibration it sets the sub at -4.5 dB (with Left Front at 0 dB). But then when I play test tones (both with the receiver tones and DVE disc tones) the subwoofer plays 15dB louder (90 dB) than all the other speakers playing at 75 dB. Is that correct and expected or am I doing something wrong? The amount of bass sounds good to me for movies but I like a lot of bass for special effects.
Thanks for your (or anyone else who wishes to comment) help.
EAST1

Does anyone know what kind of digital analog converter Sony uses in the new ES line? Is it a Sony proprietary chip or do they buy it from a known vendor?
Best

I just bought the 4600 for the switched/unswitched capability of the two HDMI outs. That said, I'm having problems too. To test this, I am running HDMI from my Time Warner Motorola cable box to the AVR. From there, HDMI A is going to my 3-year old Sony SXRD KDS-60A3000 and the HDMI B is going to a 1-year old Sony 22EX-308.

I can view cable programs on each TV one at a time. But when I select HDMI A+B, the picture on both TV's flickers on and off for a minute or so then just goes black. The troubleshooting tips in the manual don't help me.

I've read your solution, but frankly, I didn't really understand it (my bad, not yours). Is there no way for me to use this feature, on a Sony AVR, w/ two relatively new Sony TV's? If not, I'm inclined to go w/ the 3600 as I mainly paid the extra $350 for this feature.

I would really appreciate some help with this. I've just added on a covered patio to my house and wanted to use this feature to play the same football game in the living room and patio. (I want to use HDMI to utilize ARC.)

Thanks in advance for any advice.