Very basic connecting questions

[m3jappa]

Very basic because it is (i think).

Haven't used an av receiver for years but plan to in the not to distant future, ideally i might use my 10 odd year old yamaha receiver i haven't used for a while.....

Am i right in thinking that in terms of connecting everything up i need:

tv : hdmi to av receiver

dvd would connect to avr

sky q box to avr

and so on.

Is that right?

I am sure thats how i had it set up years ago but i cant remember how you control the source from that av receiver.

Or

Basically, how do multiple sources connect to the avr.

I hope that makes sense, this is a bit of an afterthought i need to deal with while i have the ability to chase walls, lift floors and basically do it right before its a bodge

[Brother D]

Download the manual - but 10 years old should just be exactly as you think - the AV as the hub where you select the input

[simon_harris]

The problem you are likely to have is the quality of the sources and the capability of the AV receiver, check if it will handle 4K and 4K pass through for example

[Lucid_AV]

m3jappa said:

Very basic because it is (i think).

Haven't used an av receiver for years but plan to in the not to distant future, ideally i might use my 10 odd year old yamaha receiver i haven't used for a while.....

Am i right in thinking that in terms of connecting everything up i need:

tv : hdmi to av receiver

dvd would connect to avr

sky q box to avr

and so on.

Is that right?

I am sure thats how i had it set up years ago but i cant remember how you control the source from that av receiver.

Or

Basically, how do multiple sources connect to the avr.

I hope that makes sense, this is a bit of an afterthought i need to deal with while i have the ability to chase walls, lift floors and basically do it right before its a bodge

You have a couple of ways to connect, and you can even mix and match according to which suits best. I've gone back to the 2012 Yamaha model range. It's a two-tier range. The RX-V are the AV receivers, and the RX-A series are classed as AV amps. They're a step up in sound quality. The 2012 RX-V range has 3-digit numbers ending -73. Te amp range models are 4-digits, all ending -20. I've given all this detail because we all tend to get a bit fuzzy on how long we've owned stuff. The model features change each year, and one feature that would be useful for you is HDMI ARC.

The two options for wiring up are either
a) direct to the receiver, then picture out via HDM
b) direct to the TV, then audio pass-thru via HDMI ARC to the AV receiver.

Method 'b' is useful where you have a source with higher picture quality features than the receiver can handle, but the sound to go with that source is quite basic. This is your Sky Q box in a nutshell.

The picture can be 4K, and include HDR in the form of HLG. It's very likely that your TV will handle that, but a 2012/2013 era AV receiver might be okay with the 4K bit, but struggle with HLG. (You'd have to look up the specs for your exact model.) Meanwhile, the sound from Sky Q is never anything better than Dolby Digital 5.1 (with or without Dolby Atmos). The HDMI ARC connection will pass DD5.1 to the AV receiver, no issue at all. There's no point passing Dolby Atmos though if the receiver can't process it, so that 'bolt-on' gets ignored. Simples.

Method 'a' suits devices such as DVD players and Blu-ray players. Here, the picture is a maximum of 1080p, and a 2012 can handle that with ease. The sound though is way better than standard HDMI ARC can cope with. Ordinary ARC (not eARC) can handle DD5.1 and DTS sound like you get from DVDs. The catch is that many TVs with ARC and even with eARC suck at handling DTS. They just don't pass it, so you lose out.

When it comes to the better sound from Blu-ray (Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio) then you can forget that with standard ARC. It just can't cope with the extra numbers of bits, and that's before you factor in TV's lousy handling of all DTS variants.

The simple solution here is to connect your DVD/Blu-ray player to the AV receiver, and let it handle all that True-HD / Master-Audio high bitrate goodness whilst passing the picture part of things to the TV. Again, simples.

A couple of side benefits of using ARC are that you have to switch on HDMI control to enable the ARC features, so when you turn on the Sky box then the amp should switch on along with the TV, and the amp will change source to Sky if it was doing something else. Your Sky remote volume buttons will control the amp volume. You'll also get sound from the TV if/when you're watching Freeview, or using the TV apps, or using a USB pen drive to play media files.

To recap then, go direct to the TV for Sky Q, any higher-end gaming consoles (PS4/5, XBox One S/X), 4K streaming devices (Fire stick, Roku, Apple TV, nVidia Shield)

Go direct to the AV receiver for legacy video devices where audio is a bigger priority. DVD players, Blu-ray players, 1080p gaming consoles (XBox, PS3)

Feel free to mix and match connection methods as appropriate to their needs. For anything else not covered by the above, you should now have the tools to decice whether it belongs to connection method a or b.