No Audio through TOSLINK

[ssrini]

Recently, I replaced all my RCA analog sound cable interconnects between the A/V Receiver and DVD player/cable box/DVD Changer with TOSLINK cables. Unfortunately, I cannot hear any sound from both DVD changer and TV (cable box). Only the DVD player works fine. Any help/advice to troubleshoot this problem would be appreciated.

Here is my set up:
A/V Rcvr - Denon AVR-3803
DVD Player - Oppo 981 HD
DVD Changer (used primarily as a CD player) - Panasonic DVD-CP67S
Cable Box - Scientifc Atlanta HD Set Top Box (Time Warner cable).

All I did was the following:
1. I removed the original analog interconects.
2. Replaced them with TOSLINK cables from digital OUTPUT from each of these devises to Digital INPUT on the Denon.
3. Assigned the Digital Inputs to the devices on the Denon Receiver.

The Oppo DVD worked fine with Audio, no sound from Panasonic DVD changer and TV audio via cable box. While the Panasonic manual is less than clear, I figured I needed to change the default Audio settings on the DVD player to enable Digital Audio. The 4 options that are provided for this DVD changer are:

PCM Down Conversion - set this to YES (default value NO)
Dolby Digital - "Bitstream" (default value was "Bitstream", did not change it).
DTS Digital Surround - set it to "Bitstream" (default value OFF)
Dynamic Range Compression - OFF (default was OFF, did not change it)

No luck after making these changes as well.

Thanks
--Srini

 

[MDS]

Cable box:
- There is a menu option called 'digital out' on SA cable boxes. Set it to Dolby Digital (not 'Other' which actually means PCM).
- You must also connect the analog cables from the cable box to the receiver because many of the channels are analog audio. As long as your receiver's digital input format is set to 'Auto' it will automatically switch between the digital and analog inputs as you change cable channels.
- To verify that you are getting a digital signal use a cable channel that always has digital audio, like any of the Music Choice channels. The receiver should indicate DD 2.0 for those channels.

Changer:
- Sounds like you have all the right settings although PCM downconversion will not affect you unless that option means something different than it normally means (normally it means downsample 96 kHz to 48 kHz and you don't want to do that unless the receiver's DACS are not capable of 96 kHz or greater).

- Many players have a single 'digital out' option and DD/DTS are not separate options like yours. Is it possible that the player has an additional menu option that governs PCM output (from CDs)? It may be listed as 'LPCM out' with choices of 'LPCM vs PCM' or 'On vs Off'. Set it to LPCM or On. [That basically means send linear PCM as linear PCM whereas the PCM option means convert the LPCM to analog and if that is how it is set you would hear nothing since you removed the analog cables.

 

[ssrini]

MDS,
Thanks for your help. Changing the input settings to Auto resulted in fixing the TV audio problem. A change to DVD changer audio configuration resulted in fixing this problem as well.
Thanks again,
-Srini

 

[MDS]

No problem at all. Glad it's all working properly now.