Home theater arrives tomorrow, but I've got a question tonight

[Supermercado]

I've got the sound portion of my home theater en route right now and it should all be here tomorrow. Receiver came yesterday and my cables and speakers tomorrow.

I had a question about the setup of everything and figured someone here would know the answer. My current setup is my cable box to TV via HDMI. The receiver is going to be put in the chain there, cable box to receiver via HDMI and then the video to TV via HDMI and sound to the speakers. My question is regarding the sound. My receiver can process the HDMI audio so I'm not terribly worried about the above setup. I use a Logitech Harmony 550 remote and will be setting up the above setup as my Watch TV activity. What I'd like to do is also set up a Watch TV Quiet activity or something for late at night when I want to watch TV but don't want the full surround sound setup running. That setup would be the same as what I've got now, cable box to receiver via HDMI and then what I'd like to do, if possible, would be to not send the audio to the surround speakers but to the TV speakers. Using the existing HDMI to do so would be preferable but I've got an RCA audio cable I could use if need be.

Is what I'm hoping to do even possible? I'd think it would be but this is my first theater setup so I don't really know.

If it matters, the components I've got are:

TV: Pioneer PDP-5080HD
Cable box: Scientific Atlanta 8300HDC
Receiver: Harman/Kardon AVR-247
Speakers: Harman/Kardon HKTS 18

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[DaveSimmons]

The HK might have a late night setting to compress the dynamic range, that would probably sound better than the TV speakers.

If not you'd need to do something like lower the volume on the receiver to 0 via remote and raise the volume on the TV. Mute might not be the right choice since my Onkyo overlays "mute" on the screen when I do that.

Another option is to keep a pair of headphones around for later viewing. Plugging them in mutes the speakers on my Onkyo.

 

[Supermercado]

I checked the manual for the receiver and it has a night mode so I'll give that a shot and see if that does what I want. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Reel]

Night mode is usually a Dolby Digital thing so it would only work on DVDs and HD channels and other Dolby Digital sources.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Does the receiver have an option to silence individual speakers? Like intentionally force it to run in stereo (for example)? If so, you could figure out the sequence required and program the macro into your Harmony (and then reverse it to reenable all the speakers).

Night mode is a Dolby trademark, it only works with Dolby Digital encoded titles.

And now that I think about it, what specifically do you want at night versus during the day? That's a 5.1 system. Do you want the subwoofer and rears off during the night? Just the sub? Sub, rears and center channel? I don't know about that specific speaker combo, but could you simply turn the subwoofer off? Or, barring that, unplug the LFE cable at the receiver? You'd still have the 5 speakers working, just without the punch of the sub (which is generally what one wants for night time viewing).

 

[Supermercado]

Good call, Atomic Playboy. I'd never messed with sequences on the Harmony but I was able to determine the sequence to switch the receiver to stereo and program that to a button. The only drawback is that the Harmony limits you to 5 steps per sequence and changing from surround to stereo and back takes 8 or 9 so I had to put part of the sequence on one button and the rest of it on another. It's not perfect but I think it does what I want.

Thanks!