Help! my surround sound doesn't surround me

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:06:05PM -0400, Laura Conrad wrote:
> 
> I splurged and got a surround receiver and 3 more speakers, and was
> expecting to be able to watch movies and cable tv in surround sound
> instead of stereo.
> 
> I know all the speakers are hooked up right, because the FM radio and
> the broadcast TV are using all of them.
> 
> But neither my DVD player nor the cable TV is coming out of any of the
> new speakers.  
> 
> The DVD player is connected via HDMI to the TV set.  All the TV audio
> outputs are going through an SPDIF cable to the new receiver, and I
> assume that's set correctly, since the broadcast TV gets surround
> sound.

It's likely that your TV is not passing the audio signal from
the DVD player correctly. Try connecting a digital sound output
from the DVD player to your receiver.

> The cable box, which I've finally seen the back of, is connected to
> the TV via the Composite cables the way the installer did it.   Is
> this why I can't get surround, or is Comcast just not sending it?  If
> I get an HDMI cable and connect the cable box to the TV via HDMI, will
> that help?

Yes, probably not them, probably yes.

> here.  I haven't fired up the computer and changed cables around to
> see if it's sending surround sound.  I do have an order in for a
> firewire cable to connect it to the cable box, and then maybe I'll
> have lots of mythtv questions.

I thought from your Subject that this was going to be a "I
hooked up all the cables properly from my computer to my
receiver, and it still sounds like stereo!" which is usually
caused by an obscure badly labelled switch in alsamixer going by
a name like DXS1.

-dsr-


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