I recently got the Kenwood HTB-544 system, and am so far very happy with it. The one thing that seems strange so far, however, is when using the PLII modes. I have my cable box going to my VCR, and then the VCR audio going through regular AV cable to the receiver. So when the VCR is on, I can use the VCR input on the receiver for cable TV audio and VHS audio.
Typically I leave the receiver on PLII Movie when I'm watching cable TV. It seems as if a lot of the time the receiver switches in and out of surround mode, almost as if it is not sure about what to send where. Watching MTV, for example, all of a sudden signal will start coming out of the surround speakers at times. It stops just as randomly other times.
It doesn't seem like this is a receiver problem, because I experience consistent surround through the digital out on my DVD player, either in DTS or Dolby 5.1 modes. It's just spotty with cable/PLII.
If you want sound from the cable box when the VCR is off, connect the cable box's audio outs directly to another input on the receiver.
Whether the surrounds speakers work or not in the PLII mode depends on the audio that is playing. If the audio is in mono, there may be little or no sound from the surround speakers. If the audio has a wide stereo image, there will be a lot of sound in the surround speakers.
Seth
Posted on
The cable only has co-ax out, so I run the cable to the VCR, and then another co-ax from the VCR to the TV. I then have both the VCR audio out and TV audio out going into the receiver as Video 1 (VCR) and Video 2 (TV). For whatever reason the sound is better when it goes through the VCR, so I leave it on mostly.
In any case, the question was really about how steady and reliable PLII seems for other people when they use it for surround during TV broadcasts. To me it seems spotty. I was wondering if this is because of the fact that it is really guessing at what should be surround, and this is as good as one can expect for basically interpreting 5 sound channels from a 2 channel broadcast. Or is PLII consistent for other people and I just have a problem with my setup?
tslugmo
Posted on
And also, does that mean lacking normal Dolby Pro-Logic during Pro-Logic (non II) encoded broadcasts results in distorted audio? I mean, should the receiver have both PLI and II, in case the source is PLI and you don't want the receiver guessing and messing up, as Seth is describing?
-tslugmo
Anonymous
Posted on
To answer Seth's question: it sounds to me like you are actually feeding your TV a mono signal, which is what is then sent to your receiver; the coax output from a VCR is mono, as the cost of the circuitry to reconstruct an MTS (stereo broadcast) signal in the VCR is prohibitively expensive. That's why things sound better when you use the Video 1 input; you're sending a stereo signal to the receiver. Both editions of Pro Logic require a stereo signal to work properly; DPL and DPLII generate center and surround channels based on the similarities, and differences, between the two stereo channels. A mono signal will just send all audio to the center channel.
Many of today's TV programs are in fact Dolby Surround encoded, so they will work fine with DPLII. If there is a problem with a TV program, it may well lie in the way your cable system is processing the audio signal.
Re the distortion you hear, this is not an artifact of DPLII (DPLII is in fact cleaner than the original DPL), but part of the original program (or transmission chain) that you're hearing more clearly than before. Try listening to a prerecorded videotape or a cleanly recorded CD; the sound should be pretty clean.
To answer tslugmo's question: No, you don't want to have DPLI if you can have DPLII. DPLII is simply a newer and better technology that bridges the gap between stereo and multichannel sound in ways that DPLI never could, without any penalties in sound quality.
The reason I had mentioned that you connect the audio out of the cable box's to the receiver is bceause you will get a better siganl. PLII will not sound good if it being modulated by the VCR (once) and then the TV (twice). For the best sound qulaity, you should get a new cable box that has audio outputs. If you happen to watach TV through an antenna, and access the audio from the TVs audio outs, this should sound better than the cable box sound (if you did want to watch a TV program received through the antenna). Same with a video tape. The surround sound sounds better when a VCR is connected directly to the receiver with audio cables, not RF to the TV, then audio out of the TV.