General Question about hooking up speakers for 5.1 DD

[awong505]

Hi,

I am new to the home audio field so excuse me if this is a stupid question. My speakers only use wire for their connections to the amp and speakers themselves. Do they have to the the digital 1/8"? or 'plug' inputs to the receiver to be able to use DD 5.1 or DTS sound? On my receiver it says '5.1' only over the plug inputs on the back of the receiver and not over the 'wire' inputs on the back of the receiver. Did I explain it clearly? Thanks for any help.

[eq_shadimar]

The digital link is for inputs only (CD player, DVD player, mp3 player etc.). For your receiver you will always use speaker wire (analog) between the receiver and speakers.

5.1 is a way of saying that the system has outputs (and inputs) for the front left and right, center, and rear left and right speakers (5) and a low frequency effects (LFE) or subwoofer (.1) Generally it also means that the receiver will have some bass management abilities and can direct the proper frequencies to the correct speakers.

DD 5.1 and DTS are different methods of encoding the 5.1 movie or music soundtrack on a DVD. Either your reciever or your DVD will decode these. Generally if you connect a digital (coax or optical) cable between your DVD or CD player to your reciever, your receiver is decoding the digital signal and transforming it into an analog signal that your reciever then amplifies and sends to your speakers. If you are using the analog 5.1 outputs (RCA jacks) between the DVD (or SACD etc) player then the player is is performing the decoding and transformation into an analog signal and sending it to the receiver which then amplifies the signal and sends it to your speakers.

So in answer to your basic question if you have a receiver, player, and software that supports 5.1 sound and it is all hooked up correctly you will be enjoying DD 5.1 or DTS sound even though your speakers are hooked up with plain old speaker wire.

I hope that helps somewhat. Post back if you have more questions.

Laters,

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...wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world...

My Home Theater Page

This message has been edited by eq_shadimar on 01-04-2002 at 11:03 PM

[awong505]

thanks a million for the quick response. not sure this cleared up my questin though. some speakers have 'plugs' on the end of their wires to hook into the rear of the receiver and some just have bare wires running into the receiver, i have the ability for both on the back of my receiver but my speakers dont have the plugs on the end of the speaker wires, does this matter? i understand that you need to use speaker wire between receiver and speakers but is there any difference between bare wire and the 1/8" plugs that some wires have on the ends? sorry if you explained this, didnt fully understand it if you already stated it.

[MagnumMan]

The plugs you are talking about, are they attached to the bare wire. They make what they call Banana plugs to hook wire to. This allows for easy hookups. That way,if you ever need to unhook the system for anything, it saves a lot of time and hassle.

Some of the older cheap speakers had cables with plugs that ran inside the speaker to a small power unit.

Many new speakers have amps built-in,so you run cable, rather than speaker wire, from receiver to speaker. This is best if there is a great distance to travel.

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Jerry

CP RULZ

[eq_shadimar]

Ah I see sorry I didn't quite get your question. The above is correct. The plugs are called banana plugs and are mainly used for convenience. If you only have bare wires that is fine too. The important thing is to get a good tight connection. You want to check the connections from time to time.

There are some issues with oxidation of the wire that over time (usally years) may have some affect on the sound. Soldering wires into plugs or just tinning the ends can prevent this but if you are not handy with a soldering iron then don't worry about it. Just use what you have to make the connections and enjoy :-)

Laters,

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...wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world...

My Home Theater Page

This message has been edited by eq_shadimar on 01-06-2002 at 01:18 AM

[toddvj]

Yeah, the speaker connections have nothing to do with whether or not you get 5.1. It's all determined by the connection between the source (e.g. DVD player) and the receiver. The easiest and most effective way is to use a digital connection (Optical or Digital Coax) If you have a DVD player with a built in decoder(it will have outputs that look similar to the 5.1 inputs on your receiver) you can hook 3 pairs of RCA's between them. Usually you would only use this option if you don't have a digital input on the back of your receiver. One thing many people miss is that you must also set your DVD player to output a multichannel digital signal, this is very important, I guarantee you there are hundreds, if not thousands of people watching movies right now who think they are getting Dolby Digital but they aren't because they didn't go into the set-up menu in their DVD player and set it for Dolby Digital (Bitstream)

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My Home Theater

[boa12]

yea what todd said & u usually need to turn on the DTS

in the player setup too. many on here couldn't understand why the dts wouldn't work using the direct output/inputs.

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My Home Systems Page

[awong505]

thanks for the help guys, i dont have banana plugs i know that much, but my question was answered. you guys are a great help. thanks again.

aaron

p.s. one more question though, someone told me that you need to use the optical connection to get 5.1 dd and DTS (3 coaxial plugs wont do it)....is this true? this is what people stated they had to do to get their XBOX to have DTS and DD. Maybe its just for the XBOX though huh? Well you guys have been a great help. Thanks.

[MagnumMan]

Correct, you have to use a Optical or Coaxial digital cable for the DD & DTS signal. These surround formats encode the channels into one digital bitstream to be transferred to the processor to be decoded.

From everything I've read in magazines, use the coaxial digital cable if your player has it. In the early days of DD, they always talked about optical. But after time, they claimed that coaxial digital is better.

Even though many dvd players have onboard DD decoding, I wouldn't use it. The digital-to-analog converters are most often better in receivers and stand alone processors than the player.

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Jerry

CP RULZ