Yet another receiver suggestion thread

[JerryR]

One more question - does the automatic speaker setup on the 605 work properly with 5.1 speakers, or only with 7.1?

[tigeraudio2007]

The Auto Speaker calibration and EQ with Audyssey MultEQ, works great with 5.1. 7.1 in my opinion is useless at this point in time. As I have discussed at length before, 2 extra surround back channels only serve to blur the range of motion of the sound movement. This is because more than 90% of the material out there is 5.1 mixed only. Then the majority of the rest is mixed for matrixed 5.1/6.1 or discrete 6.1. There are barely handfuls of true 7.1 mixes out there. Stick with 5.1, it will definitely sound better, and the auto setup on the Onkyo is amazing. Depending on how picky you are you may want to make some tweaks of your own after the auto setup is done. But it certainly gets you beyond the ballpark.

[JerryR]

Tiger, I ordered a TX-SR605 and received it yesterday. I haven't hooked it up yet, but last night I was reading through the manual, and it says on page 68, "Digital inputs are output by only the digital outputs, and analog inputs are output by only the analog outputs. There is no internal conversion from digital to analog or vice versa."

This is under the section talking about recording. If I understood what you were saying in previous messages, this contradicts it. This is a bit distressing, since it was the primary reason I bought a new receiver.

What it looks like it can do is detect whether an analog or digital input is connected for a given source and automatically use whichever one is present. This is different from my old receiver where you had to press a Signal Select button to switch.

One thing I am not clear on, and I guess I'll have to connect it up to know for sure, is what happens when both analog and digital inputs are connected for a given source. Will the digital input go to the speakers and the analog input go to tape out? Are there two audio paths through the receiver? If the answer is yes, that may work out, assuming my DVR can output both at once. My old receiver would output noise on the analog outputs when a digital source was being played.

[JerryDelColliano]

Anybody named Jerry from Pennsylvania couldn't be wrong - could he?

[JerryR]

No more than a Jerry from Beverly Hills could be.

On a serious note, I can't really tell from your comment if you thought I was being rude in some way, but just to make sure, I want to state that it wasn't my intent to make any definitive statements, just to try to understand why my reading of the manual seemed to disagree with my interpretation of what Tiger wrote.

Either my interpretations are wrong, the manual is wrong, or he was wrong. Maybe more than one. All I know is that you guys know a heck of a lot more about this stuff than I do, and I would welcome enlightenment. In the unlikely event I'm not wrong in my interpretations, hopefully I'm providing useful info.

[JerryR]

I hooked up the receiver just now and verified that a digital input does not get converted to analog and output on the tape out. Does anyone have a recommendation for a receiver comparable to the 605 that does convert a digital input signal and output it on the analog outputs? If I can't get the software on the computer which I'm using as a source to output analog and digital simultaneously, I'll have to return the Onkyo.