I don’t want to hijack Grrr’s thread, so I have an unrelated question.
I bought a surround sound system. I decided to try setting it up with just using the optical audio cable to connect the TV to the receiver. That way any input into the TV can go through the surround sound system if I want it, or if I don’t it can go through the TV speakers. My roku, my DVD Player, my digital film player, gaming consoles. This was easier than attaching everything via HDMI to my receiver.
But does optical audio provide the same quality as HDMI? I listened to a blu ray movie on my blu ray player when the setup was blu ray to TV via HDMI, then TV to receiver via optical audio cable. The sound quality wasn’t as good as when the setup was blu ray to receiver via HDMI, then receiver to TV via HDMI.
Is that my imagination, or do you need everything attached via HDMI thru the receiver to get true surround sound (do I need to connect everything to my receiver via HDMI, then have a single HDMI cable connecting the recover to the TV)? Would this only apply to blu rays, or would roku movies (many are in 5.1), movies that are stored digitally on a USB stick, or gaming consoles also see higher quality audio if I used HDMI cables?
This is my first surround sound system.
Ideally, I wouldn’t mind connecting everything to my receiver via HDMI, then connecting that to the TV via HDMI if the option to still use the TV speakers was an option and totally bypass the receiver (not having to turn it on). Sometimes I prefer the TV speakers for my own reason. My system lets me pick a 2.1 channel speaker output rather than 5.1 though, but I sometimes just prefer the regular TV speakers.
digital audio is digital, it works or it doesn’t; there’s no variance in quality when carrying the same encoded signal. If it doesn’t work, you’ll get pops, clicks, or nothing at all.
HDMI has more bandwidth, and can carry lossless surround whereas optical/SPDIF can’t. so any potential differences in what you heard may be down to the codec used; optical might have been Dolby Digital 5.1 while HDMI can handle 8-channel Meridian Lossless, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS Master.
Short answer - yes, optical digital will provide the same quality as HDMI.
Longer answer, and what may have happened to you - when you connect a source to a receiver through a digital connection, such as a blu-ray to a TV, there is some handshaking that goes on, where they communicate their capabilities and agree what media format they’ll use.
If your TV isn’t Dolby 5.1 capable, the components may have negotiated using 2.1 or 2.0 audio. So that’s what will be transmitted over HDMI to the TV. So when the TV sent the audio signal to the surround sound receiver through the optical cable, it sent the 2.0 audio since that’s all it had received from the player.
When you did bluray->receiver->TV all through HDMI, the audio capability negotiation was between the bluray player and the receiver, so you got the full 5.1 Dolby.
Two things to try - see if your receiver can display the audio format it’s actually receiving and putting over the speakers. See if it changes when you change the connections around.
And if your blu-ray player has an optical output, connect that directly from the player to the surround receiver. You should also now be getting 5.1 audio, because the player and receiver
This exact scenario happened to me - the optical out from my TV is essentially useless, because it always sends 2.0 audio even when the TV is connected to a 5.1 source. I had to reconfigure things to go directly from the 5.1 sources to the receiver itself.
This is a bit from memory, but I think it’s important that the TV or amp have “full passthrough” mode (or something similar to that term) to keep from modifying the audio data as it is passed to the output. (Much as **muldoonthief **puts it.) I have never used this configuration but seem to have read this in a couple of turgid manuals.