[Burnout01]

I ordered a Harman Kardon AV254 Receiver and Harmon Kardon 5.1 HKTS 18 Speaker set that will be used with a Samsung BDP1500 Player. Will I lose anything if I don't use the rear speakers? I have a awkward shaped living room and mounting the rear speakers is going to be difficult and ugly. I guess I'm worried that if I don't have the two rear speakers hooked up, I won't be able to do the True HD audio and other audio formats.

Thanks for any help.

 

[MichaelJHuman]

Yes, you will lose the surround effect

Lossless codecs such as TrueHD are independent of the number of channels.


Receivers are supposed to properly mix down the audio tracks to your speaker configuration. As far as I know, players should do the same. HDMI has a mechanism for communicating to the player the speaker configuration. If it's working properly, you will not lose any sounds, you just won't get surround from the intended direction.