I dont understand the statement about getting Dobly Digital with optical or coax. Please explain this to me.
If you have a digital audio cable (
coax or
optical), you can send a 5.1 channel audio signal through there. 6 separate channels of audio can be sent through just that one cable. For regular DVD's this was all you needed (well not exactly because of DVD-A/SA-CD, but that just complicates things). The 5.1 signals were either dolby digital or dts tracks.
However, dolby digital and dts are low bitrate formats. Think of them as the mp3's of the surround sound world. When Blu-Ray and HD-DVD came out, they allowed for high bit-rate audio formats in your home theater. Dolby has TrueHD and DD+. DTS has DTS HD-MA. These formats are still "compressed," but they are
lossless, much like
FLAC is compressed but lossless in 2-channel audio. There is also uncompressed 7.1 PCM (you may have seen it in blu-ray commercials). Uncompressed PCM is basically the surround sound version of an audio CD. The gist of all that is, you need HDMI to send these lossless formats digitally.
Of course, you can send any kind of format, lossless or lossy, with multi-channel analog cables. Only one channel is sent per cable, so you need 6 RCA cables for 5.1, 8 for 7.1. But you don't need an HDMI receiver this way to get lossless audio.
I was told allways to hook all of your A/V items into the receiver then hook the reciver outputs to the TV. Is that the correct method ?
For video you can just hook up your cables (HDMI, component, composite, etc.) straight into the TV. The only reason you may want to send it to a receiver first is so you only send one cable to the TV or if your receiver upscales the signal. However, there's absolutely nothing wrong withhooking up video straight from your equipment to your TV. Your current receiver doesn't have HDMI or component video, so I'd definitely just bypass it for video.
BTW, in case you were wondering, the hierarchy of video cables goes:
composite < s-video < component <= HDMI.
Of those 4, only component and HDMI can send HD signals. I use nothing worse than component.
For audio, definitely hook up your A/V equipment to your receiver and from there into your TV. You only would want to hook up the receiver to the TV if you don't use your speaker system all the time. I myself don't hook up any audio equipment to the TV because whenever the TV is on, the receiver and speakers are on.
fyi... I did run some wires from the tv to the A/V area. I ran 1 HDMI , 1 S-Video , 1-RCA video , 1-RCA (red/white). These are all hooked up to the tv and jacks in the A/V area.
That may or may not be necessary depending on how you want to set things up. I don't know how many HDMI and component video inputs your TV has. But here's what I'd try to do...
For
video
Tivo ->
HDMI -> TV
Blu-Ray -> HDMI -> TV
Wii ->
Wii Component -> TV
PS2 -> composite/s-video/component (if possible) -> TV
Xbox -> xbox component (if possible) -> TV
The Wii will benefit from component. You should get it. It's cheap anyway.
For
audio
Tivo -> optical/coax -> receiver
Blu-Ray ->
3x RCA pairs -> receiver (use the analog outputs of your blu-ray player and analog inputs of your receiver)
Wii -> RCA -> receiver (Definitely take advantage of the
Pro Logic II that your receiver has though)
PS2 -> RCA -> receiver (PS2 can also use Dolby Pro Logic II)
Xbox -> optical (if possible) -> receiver
I hope that makes sense...
I definitely recommend YOyoYOhowsDAjello's recommendation on making sure everything is set up correctly before you upgrade any of your components. (and if you do upgrade, I think speakers should be upgraded first, but one step at a time)