Both connectors are purple, so it's easy to do. This is a mistake that even experienced people make. One of the symptoms of mistakenly using the Surr Back terminals in a 5.1 setup is Audyssey failing when it tests the Surrounds. The Surr Back L and Surr Back R terminals only get used for 7.1. That's okay, just make sure you connect them to the Surr L and Surr R terminals. In a 7.1 system, you have two additional speakers behind you connected to the surround back speaker terminals.īecause of room constraints or personal taste, many people with 5.1 systems put the surround speakers in the back of the room. The two on the sides are called the surround speakers and they should be connected to the surround speaker terminals. In a 5.1 system, you should have 3 speakers in front and two on the sides. A lot of people new to home theater assume that in a 5.1 setup you have 3 front speakers and 2 behind you, and that when you go to 7.1, you put the two additional speakers on the sides. It's very easy to have 1 or 2 stray copper wires brush up against the adjacent speaker terminal or the chassis which can trip the protection circuits or damage your receiver.Ĭonsider using banana plugs to avoid this problem, especially at the receiver end, or solder the bare ends of the wires to keep them from fraying. Take your time with the speaker wires, especially if you're using bare wire connections. This is one mistake that can cost you your receiver. If you want to use zone 2/3, you have to run stereo analog cables from your sources to your receiver in addition to any HDMI or SPDIF cables. Bitstreams is very short and includes the Toshiba HD-A35 and HD-XA2 with firmware = 2.7, the Samsung BD-P1400 w/firmware update, the Pioneer Elite 95FD, and the Panasonic DMP-BD30. The list of players that can transmit TrueHD, DD+ etc. Your receiver can't look at the PCM and tell what format it was in originally so it can't turn on the indicator on the front panel. They decode the bitstream and send multichannel PCM. However, in order to see the TrueHD or DD+ or DTS-HD indicators light on your receiver, the player has to send the undecoded bitstream. If you have things configured correctly, you'll get all the benefit of TrueHD, DD+ and DTS-HD with your Onkyo receiver, assuming your HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player is capable.

Always set HDMI Audio Out=OFF unless you want to use your television's speakers. Symptoms include not being able to receive any signal format other than 2 channel PCM, getting video but no audio from HDMI sources, and your receiver always being muted when you first turn it on. This one is very common and it causes a lot of problems.

Here's my list of the 10 most common problems people have with their new Onkyo receivers and how to deal with them. I've spent a lot of time over the last couple months in the various Onkyo receiver threads, and there are a number of issues that come up over and over again.

Manual onkyo ht-r380