Help connecting Sony blu Ray to surroundbar

Hawkdog

I recently purchased a surround bar which works great with my sharp tv. While it will work with standard DVDs, when I play a blu ray DVD, it flips back to tv sound. The DVD is a Sony. Any setting suggestions?

disneyjoe7

Hawkdog, Welcome to Polk Audio Forums.

Can you tell us what equipment is connected to what?

The TV, the receiver, the Blu Ray player, and is this a DVD player also? Or is there a separate DVD player?

Hawkdog

Surroundbar connectEd to tV via provided optical cable. Blu-Ray connectEd to tv via hdmi. Surroundbar works w/ blu-Ray disc thru title/menu screen, but ceases to be heard once the feature begins.

disneyjoe7

There's something setup in the Blu Ray player, and since you have it connected to TV and not a receiver I think something like PCM down in the player could help.

You could give make and model of Blu-Ray and the TV, so we could give you a better answer. But think that may put you in the correct direction.

Hawkdog

We've tried a number of audio settings on the blu-ray in an attempt to sort things out, without much success. Hoping for a magic formula. As mentioned previously, old-school DVD's work OK -- using same settings and same player.

Hawkdog

Blu-Ray = Sony BDP-S370/BX37
Thanks for your help!

disneyjoe7

Hawkdog wrote: »

We've tried a number of audio settings on the blu-ray in an attempt to sort things out, without much success. Hoping for a magic formula. As mentioned previously, old-school DVD's work OK -- using same settings and same player.

But you're using 2 different feeds being...

1.) Optical

2.) HDMI

disneyjoe7

In the manual page 23 look to see the following.. If you get to work you could change one at a time to see what you can do and not do.


http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/Sony_BDPS370_Manual.pdf

I start at the Audio HDMI

set to PCM and not auto.



Then Downmix

set to Surround and not Stereo


Hope that helps.

tonyb

Did you even check the blu-ray to see if they have a Dolby digital soundtrack ? Some don't,only the high rez audio, which won't play over a digital cable. The way I understand this is you have no receiver,correct ? Just connected by hdmi to the tv ? Plus an optical cable from the TV to the soundbar ?

Hawkdog

Diz-Gave those settings a shot, still no joy in mudville...

Tony-No receiver in play. Soundbar connected directly to TV via optical cable. Blu-Ray disk has multiple soundtracks, many in 5.1, but the only one that seems to work is a 2.0 paired with a spoken description of action onscreen (for the visually impaired, which thankfully we are not).

disneyjoe7

Not sure what model of the soundbar you have, but could you install the Blu-Ray player with the optical to the soundbar? So the audio goes to the optical, and the video goes to the tv.

jtgranby

By chance is this a surroundbar 360???

JT

Hawkdog

Will that setup (optical out from blu-ray) prevent us from using sound bar when watching cable tv? Hoping not to limit our aural enjoyment...

JT- sound bar is the 3000 model.

tonyb

Hawkdog wrote: »

Diz-Gave those settings a shot, still no joy in mudville...

Tony-No receiver in play. Soundbar connected directly to TV via optical cable. Blu-Ray disk has multiple soundtracks, many in 5.1, but the only one that seems to work is a 2.0 paired with a spoken description of action onscreen (for the visually impaired, which thankfully we are not).

All blu rays have multiple sound tracks,but alot only use the DTS HD master audio or dolby true hd format which you cannot pass over an optical cable. If the back of the blu-ray you want to watch,does not support regular DD, then your out of luck. If you hook up the audio by optical to the TV, and the video by hdmi,you have to change the audio output in the menu of the player. This however will not solve the problem of playing a blu-ray disc without a normal Dolby digital soundtrack. The way you have it hooked up, your asking the TV to pass the high rez audio formats to the soundbar, ain't gonna happen my man. You need a receiver to fully enjoy your blu-ray player. Regular dvd was easy,you just pop it in and go,blu-ray requires a tad bit more thought in the set-up of the player,and in the individual set-up of each blu-ray you want to play.

Hawkdog

Thanks for the scoop Tonyb. Good times.
Does the hi-res audio/blu-ray only work w/ the latest gen of receivers? We've got a circa '02 aiwa that we used to push a middling 5.1 setup years back.

tonyb

Hawkdog wrote: »

Thanks for the scoop Tonyb. Good times.
Does the hi-res audio/blu-ray only work w/ the latest gen of receivers? We've got a circa '02 aiwa that we used to push a middling 5.1 setup years back.

Does it have hdmi ? Then most likely not. There are other ways around it,but your blu-ray player would need 5.1 analog outputs to do so, and your receiver would need 5.1 analog inputs. Of coarse you would also need 5.1 speaker set up too. Have we confused you yet ? I know,regular DVD was simple, almost every one had a DD or DTS soundtrack and all you needed was an optical cable and you were good to go. Blu-ray isn't as simple but once you understand how it all works, it can be.

cheddar

tonyb wrote: »

All blu rays have multiple sound tracks,but alot only use the DTS HD master audio or dolby true hd format which you cannot pass over an optical cable. If the back of the blu-ray you want to watch,does not support regular DD, then your out of luck. If you hook up the audio by optical to the TV, and the video by hdmi,you have to change the audio output in the menu of the player. This however will not solve the problem of playing a blu-ray disc without a normal Dolby digital soundtrack. The way you have it hooked up, your asking the TV to pass the high rez audio formats to the soundbar, ain't gonna happen my man. You need a receiver to fully enjoy your blu-ray player. Regular dvd was easy,you just pop it in and go,blu-ray requires a tad bit more thought in the set-up of the player,and in the individual set-up of each blu-ray you want to play.

The blu-ray spec specifies a DD back-up for TrueHD. And all DTS-HD MA tracks contain a core DTS track that can be decoded as a regular lossy DTS version. So, no, you shouldn't run into the situation described above unless the disk is not made to the blu-ray spec. But you do have to make sure you select the lossy versions from the blu-ray menu.

More likely it has something to do with the audio output options in the player. If regular DVDs work on the blu-ray player, then it should be a simple matter of getting the player to decode and pass the audio along as PCM the same as it's doing for the DVDs. If the player is set to bitstream blu-ray tracks, then the TV wouldn't know what to do with the signal. Likewise, if the player received a PCM decoded lossless signal over HDMI, I'm not sure if the TV could play it, but it definitely couldn't pass the full signal back out over optical. Check the DVD audio output settings and make sure the blu-ray settings are the same if you can set them differently in the menu.