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I have been using my laptop to playback media for a few years now, my setup is:

 

Laptop to TV with HDMI, TV to receiver with HDMI.

 

My laptop is an ASUS G750JX (770M GPU, should support TrueHD and DTS MA)

My TV is a Philips LED with about 4 HDMI inputs (no problem there)

My receiver is an Onkyo HT-R990

 

I have a 5.1 setup with Onkyo speakers

 

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I haven't had the Onkyo receiver for that long (previously had a Philips receiver)

 

I recently started doubting if I was actually getting the best sound with my current setup and browsing these forums for hours today made me realise that I am probably not getting the full audio experience.

 

As I was trying to playback a DTS MA and a normal DTS audio track with MPC using the LAV Audio decoder I noticed that the input codec was dca, after adding the dtsdecoderdll to my MPC program folder it was showing the input codec as dts-hd-ma or dts when I was playing the DTS audio track. The output codec showed as PCM. It also showed PCM on my receiver next to some other stuff (I had it set to THX cinema, which showed dts and THX on the left, PCM on the right of my receiver)

 

With the little knowledge I have about audio, these forums made me realize that I would never get the same audio experience with PCM output as I would with bitstreaming (correct me if I am wrong). So I played around with the bitstream settings. Doing so changed the input codec to dca and no longer gave me any sound for both dts-hd-ma and dts. 

 

So it comes to mind that it might be my setup which doesn't have my receiver in the center of it (Since it currenly goes Laptop > TV > Receiver). So I took an extra HDMI cable, and messed around with the ports. I have 4 HDMI input ports on my receiver and 1 output port. I connected my laptop to all 4 HDMI inputs on my receiver (tried all of these one by one), while having the receiver HDMI out port port connected to one my TV's HDMI input ports. I no longer get any picture nor sound, the only thing I can see is this blue screen (think this is standard for the receiver).

 

I checked the audio settings on the laptop, and it looked like this: 

 



 

Which makes me bring up another question, what's that NVIDIA HDMI Output (Port 1) doing there? The one that it showed I am currently connected with is the only HDMI port I have on my laptop.

 

PS: I did get some kind of sound out of the bitstreaming enabled options once (some weird extremely loud cracking noise) when playing the DTS audio track but I haven't been able to reproduce this.

 

I would really appreciate it if someone could explain what I am doing wrong, if it's possible to bitstream DTS MA to my receiver using my current setup (or atleast DTS) or tell me what I am doing wrong with the advised setup (Laptop to receiver to TV).

 

 

Sorry for making this so long but I wanted to give you guys as much information as possible.

 

Thank you in advance!

 

 

EDIT: I tried bitstreaming AC3 (2 channels) and it worked fine (if you don't count the insane amount of static I suddenly receive when using it), the sound was a lot louder than using PCM but for some reason there was an insane amount of static coming from the speakers.

 

I also tried bitstreaming AC3 (6 channels) and this kinda worked, I got some sound but all I was getting was the same 3 seconds of audio being repeated like 15 times before it would go on to the next part. 

 

Is all of this the fault of my setup or should It still work without having to connect my laptop directly to the receiver?

 

EDIT: I have figured most of it out, please refer to post #2.

 

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After messing around some more with the settings I realized I had to manually set which HDMI port it had to pass through the video to my TV for and I had to set the input mode on my receiver to the one my laptop was connected to to get any audio.

 

Everything is looking fine now, DTS MA sounds awesome but the delay after pausing a track when bitstreaming (fine when using PCM output) is so annoying, not that I couldn't live with it but I am wondering if there's anything I can do about it (I am guessing it just takes my receiver some time to process all of it?)

 

There is only one other thing I would like to bring up and it's the stupid feedback/hissing noise coming from all 5 my speakers and my subwoofer (my subwoofer is boosted by 3db and he is usually the one making the most sound). This is most definitely some equalizer issue as right now I can't hear thing with having a dolby digital track paused (with the receiver still showing "Dolby D"). But when I switch to an AAC or just PCM in general and the audio mode on my receiver changes to "Multich' I get this feedback/hissing noise all over again. I checked all of the speaker their cables, so I should I just start messing around with the equalizer settings or do you have any other recommendations for me?

 

Long story short, 2 issues remain:

 

PCM output > Feedback/hissing noise from speakers/subwoofer

Bitstreaming > Delay after starting/unpausing a track