Finally! Eureka!

As most of you know, I dropped a huge pile of cash on a really good receiver earlier this year (A Yamaha v2200 for anyone keeping score). I had been very pleased with it until I bought a new DVD player. Once I wired up the new DVD player, Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 sound playback stopped working for the PS2 (my other DVD player) and I could not get it working for the new player, even though it supported it and would report that it was outputting it to my reciever.

This was driving me nuts. I went through three rounds of ‘pull stereo stack away from wall, re-wire everything, pound wall in frustration.’ Finally I did the unthinkable and sat down to read the manual carefully. Typical of consumer electronics the manual basically sucks, plus this one is like 120 pages long, so it took about half my Saturday. But I finally got to the bottom of it. It turns out the receiver is among other things a configurable video and sound router. Despite the fact that the inputs are labeled in the back (so there is a sound and video input for the dvd player, and one for the VCR, and so on) you cannot count on the inputs actually being for the component they’re labeled for. I bought the reciever as a floor model and apparantly someone went in and reconfigured the sound in and outputs, and even worse they renamed one of the sound inputs, so when I selected Cable/satelite on the front of the reciever, I was selecting the cable/satelite video feed but the audio feed was from the DVD.

No wonder I was unable to puzzle this shit out without the manual.

Anyway long story short once I renamed all the components back to their original names and got all inputs programmed correctly (which in this case simply meant back to what they are actually labeled) everything started working. Hurrah!