Av receiver issue

[Ridgewoodwoody]

Please someone tell me how I connect my Sony smart tv with my Sony AV receiver and my BT box so that I can get surround sound.

[Midnight_Voice]

@Ridgewoodwoody 

Without specific model numbers, it’s guesswork 😢

I presume you have selected surround on the BT box, and ascertained that you have selected a programme, possibly in an app that has surround? As I’m told that the BBC iPlayer doesn’t have this, for instance, for On Demand, even when the original broadcast has it.

After which, your best bet for surround is to plug the BT box into the AV receiver, rather than the TV, as it will be the AV receiver that plays the surround either way, and the AV receiver is likely to handle more surround formats than the TV does, and you don’t get tangled up in ARC versus eARC.

e.g. My LG GX TV won’t play, or even pass, DTX…

You might be able to get surround from the BT box plugged into the TV and passed over eARC, or even ARC, to the AV receiver, but this is a great deal less of a certainty that plugging the BT box directly into the AV receiver.

Sight unseen, models unknown 😛

[naylor2006]

With quite limited info indeed its tricky to answer, the EETV Box Pro delivers surround sound over DD+ (infact all sound once Surround is enabled), so the AV will need to support that, also the vast majority of the channels are in Stereo, but even when watching a Stereo channel the box will still deliver the audio via DD+ but only two channels.

So just in case your AV is showing DD+, which you would be forgiven for assuming is surround, and you are watching a stereo channel, BBC, ITV all the normal stuff it will just be 2 channel. The same thing puzzled me for some time but my AV lets me bring up an OSD to show what channels are actually active.

[Ridgewoodwoody]

Thank you. I was really just asking which cable went where between my tv, av receiver and BT Pro Box. The tv is a Sony  KD49XE8005, the av receiver is a Sony ST DN1080 witn KEF KHT 8005 speakers.

[Midnight_Voice]

@Ridgewoodwoody 

I’m sure you now appreciate the ambiguity of the question 😛

But to answer what you wanted:-

Male to male TV aerial cable to Pro box, optionally a further female to male TV aerial cable onward to Pro box, with which enable Aerial Passthrough on the Pro box.

Or run the Pro box in IP mode, in which case connect the aerial cable, if you have a terrestrial aerial, directly to the TV.

Your choice of Ethernet cable to the Pro box, or run it over WiFi.

The supplied HDMI cable from the Pro box to the AV receiver, your choice of input.

A ‘high speed HDMI with Ethernet’ cable from the ARC/eARC port on the TV to the HDMI Out (yes, Out) on the AV receiver.

I think you should be able to figure the rest. And for any other equipment to be connected over HDMI, again, put it on an AV receiver HDMI input for preference, not a TV one.

[Ridgewoodwoody]

Excellent.  Many thanks.

[naylor2006]

More curiously to me, how does one end up with a nice TV, feature packed AVR and Surround speakers without already knowing how to hook it up physically 🤣     I dont mean that to be disrespectful, just typically people who have that gear already have an idea, usually part of the reason for buying it in the first place. I would have never have thought that was the OP question!

That KEF thing is a Sound Bar with a sub and two 'surround' speakers right? The soundbar part has 3 pairs of inputs I assume.

Have you got all the speakers correctly connected?

[gomezz]

I would have though for such a comparatively high level set up that the supplying dealer would have offered to set it up for you as it is not something you are used to doing yourself.

My main problem with set up these days is the tangle of wires at the back of the equipment and the poor lighting and awkward angle to see which socket is which.  I think I need to colour tag the ends of the different cables to help me see what belongs to what.  I have got a box of different coloured insulating tapes to do the job,

[Midnight_Voice]

@gomezz @naylor2006 @Ridgewoodwoody 

I’ve not come across anything like the KEF before. It’s an entirely passive soundbar, designed to replace a 5.1 6-speaker setup with just 4 speakers - separate subwoofer and rears, but left right and centre in a single bar. And it came out in 2010, So it’s likely to be a tried and tested legacy item that @Ridgewoodwoody has from before, not something he has just bought. And it got good reviews at the time…

Though it doesn’t look like a concept that has stood the test of time, even if it’s let its owners sneak in a full AV amp where there might be domestic pushback to three large discrete speakers instead of a slim ‘soundbar’ 😛

As regards people knowing what kit they have and what it can do, who recalls the days of our friends and family having VCRs that sat winking at them because they hadn’t even set the timer? And my favourite party trick at the time was hooking such VCRs up with a SCART cable instead of composite down the aerial, usually to gasps of amazement from the owners. (Who usually went back to composite video afterwards as SCART was ‘too difficult’ to operate) 😛

We've come on a long way since then - my first Sony AV amp had three sets of setup instructions, one official and printed by Sony, one photocopied and placed in the box by Sony UK, and one the way I actually set it up 😛

[naylor2006]

You could probably take a 'Everything Saw' and cut the sound bar into 3 if you wanted a wider front end.

I am nearly 40 I have been into tech since I was 13 so of course, I have been IT support for everyone and anyone since my teens and with the further inventions of Video Plus devices etc, different cables...not even going to go into the list, I have been there for my parents and siblings. More recently most of my efforts are designing fault proof systems in my house! I get all that, I understand but my point is if my parents ended up with a TV, AVR and Surround sound and asked for help with it I would be wondering how they even came to get it in the first place 🙂 Talk about the deep end.

But I offer my apologies to this guy none the less.