Do you get better sound by connecting all inputs through the receiver or tv and than to receiver ?

Optical cables cannot carry HD audio, but for standard audio codecs you won't hear a difference between the two.

Typically you would run everything through the receiver with 1 video out / hdmi to your tv.

Unless the TV does any kind of conversion of the signal to a lossy format (which I doubt it does) there will be no perceivable difference in sound quality between HDMI or optical, whether it comes from Even if you hooked up each individual line with RCA analog cables you probably wouldn't be able to hear the difference. 44.1khz sample rate is all that is needed to reproduce the entire frequency range that a human with perfect hearing can perceive.

The receiver is made to handle both audio and video.

That receiver will improve on some standard def video as it has a solid video processor so run everything through it. It won't degrade your picture.

Listing your other equipment would also help.

Hook everything up to the Onkyo. It's designed to manage all of your components and it definitely shouldn't degrade your picture in any way, plus you have the convenience of leaving your tv on 1 input setting.

When you get your receiver, hook everything up and run your Audessey setup, which will calibrate your speaker settings for you. Then you can play around with sound modes and settings etc.

I own a 616 and it can be set to pass HDMI signals unaltered by the video processing. I'm running a DirecTV HD box, PS-3, Sony 590 3D BD player, and Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player HDMI into the 616 with one HDMI cable to the set. I do not have the video processor turned off in the 616 as it actually improves the pq from the DirecTV box and doesn't hurt the other sources. I was seriously considering purchasing a Darblet for my setup until I turned on the Qdeo video processing in the 616--the result seemed to be about the same as posters in the various Darblet threads were reporting with that $250+ device.
Edited by Steve S - 1/23/13 at 12:54pm

on that system I would think set the sub crossover at 120hz and the speakers at 80hz?

Someone else can maybe help more at this point.

Another reason to go receiver to TV: On many TVs, since they are stereo devices, the HDMI handshake tells the source to send stereo, and stereo is all that goes to the TV. The TV can't send multichannel because it never got it. If you go HDMI to the receiver, you eliminate this problem.

Your sub will have a dial on the back. Set it to 120hz.

The rest of the settings will be done in your receiver menu after you do the Audyssey calibration. Or you can just use the Audyssey settings and enjoy!

It's the frequency of sound that is being sent to the speakers. So if you set your receiver to 100hz for your speakers it will send that frequency and higher to the speaker (mid range and treble) everything below 100hz (mid range - bass) would go to the subwoofer.

Best sound is a bit subjective, and it's a large subject to absorb all at once. Basically though, your sub has a filter (Low Pass Filter) in its plate amp to prevent sounds that are too high in pitch from being amplified and played. Your receiver also has essentially this same feature in the form of a 'crossover' setting (sometimes many of them for different channels) which splits sound between speaker and sub. You do not want to create a 'hole' in your sound by having the subwoofer reject sounds that the receiver will only play on the sub, so it's best to have the subwoofer's filter frequency set high, in most cases. This is not a sharp cutoff, instead it rolls off above the setting.

I'll take a stab at this

First you should know that your receiver will have crossover settings for all the speakers in your system other than the subwoofer. These settings are available if you set your speakers to "small" rather than "large" in the receiver's setup menu. All frequencies for all speakers below this crossover setting will be rerouted to the sub. Frequencies above this crossover setting will be sent to the appropriate speakers. You can set different crossover settings for center, l/r front, l/r surround, and left/right back surround.

In your case the Sony main speakers are rated to go down to 40hz, which is wildly optimistic but does indicate that a crossover setting of 80hz or so will work well. The polk satellite speakers only go down to 95hz so the crossover setting should be set higher for them--maybe 110-120hz. All frequencies above these crossover settings will not be sent to the sub. For this reason you can set the sub's crossover knob anyhere you want as long as it's above the highest crossover setting you're using for any of the other speakers--even all the way up to the 300hz setting as nothing above the crossover settings you set on your receiver will get to the sub anyway. Most all receiver mfgs recommend setting the sub's crossover knob all the way up when using the receiver's bass management.

One benefit of using bass management (rerouting bass from mains/center/sat speakers to sub) is that it relieves the reciever of the heavy power load necessary to reproduce low bass frequencies--that load is assumed by the amp built into your powered subwoofer. This frees up power from the reciever for the mid-high frequencies for less distortion at higher volumes. This is why it's not a bad idea to go ahead and set the crossover for your speakers higher than the minimum rated frequency response of those speakers.

The human hearing apparatus can't localize frequencies below 100-120hz very well at all so there's no harm in rerouting those to a single subwoofer---it won't affect the perception of surround sound at all.

Basically, set your sub to about half it's volume setting and turn the crossover knob all the way up, run Audyssey, then check the results--if the sub level is automatically set below about -2 db or so, turn the volume knob on the sub down a bit and repeat the Audyssey setup until the receiver does set the sub level at 0db plus or minus 2. Then go in and manually set any speakers that the receiver sets to "large" to "small" and set crossover for the Sonys to 80 or so and the polks to 110-120. You don't need to rerun Audyssey again after doing this,

While 44.1 kHz for humans with imperfect hearing (read: aged) will already be overkill. LOL

I'm not sure