Is it my Blu Ray player, my receiver or something else?

[nsafreak]

Ok I have this niggling problem that I'm not quite sure what is causing it. There are times when I'll want to watch a movie and night and so not to disturb others I'll plug my headphones into my receiver. Normally this works just fine except in one specific circumstance. Namely if I'm watching a Blu Ray movie that is encoded in DTS HD. Since I have an older receiver (Harman Kardon AVR-230) I have the Blu Ray Player (Magnavox NB500MGX A) set to HDMI Audio Mute and down sampling turned on. I have downsampling turned on because I don't think my receiver supports 192kHz audio signals. If I plug in my headphones I'm not able to hear all of the audio in these cases and I seem to mainly lose the dialog track. I can still hear some of it but not all of it. If I unplug my headphones my speakers output all of the audio that I expect to hear. This does not happen on Blu Ray discs that have the option of using Dolby Digital True HD or Dolby Digital Plus as I hear all tracks in my headphones just fine.

Any ideas as to what might be causing this? Is there a setting that I need to change somewhere in either my receiver or blu ray player?

 

[PM650]

Dialogue missing indicates that you're only listening to 2ch of a multichannel track. I assume you've connected the receiver via optical or coax, so you might try setting it to Stereo mode to downmix for headphone usage. If changing the reciever mode doesn't work (dialogue still missing), the player should also be able to change the audio output format, which can usually be set to stereo as well. I suspect this is a problem with the player, as DTS-HD will be down-converted to DTS & Dolby True-HD/Plus will likewise be converted down to standard DD before being output on optical/coax. It's also possible there's a difference between how the receiver downmixes DD & DTS streams to stereo, although I think this is less likely.

 

[Project86]

I had a similar problem with a first generation HDMI surround receiver. However my problem was caused when the Blu Ray or HD DVD player decoded an audio track and output it as multi channel PCM audio. The receiver could play it back perfectly over speakers, but was not advanced enough to downmix it to 2 channel for headphones. So all I got was the main front channel sounds.

I assume (could be wrong) that your player is the Walmart version of the Magnavox NB500MG9, with only the model number slightly changed to avoid price match competition. The manual for the NB500MG9 states that it does various things to the signal based on your settings. I'm reading page 36 of the manual:

Set BD Audio Mode to HD Audio Output instead of Mix Audio Output

Set HDMI Audio Out to Audio Mute

Set Downsampling to Off, it shouldn't matter either way though

Also make sure you have Digital Out set to Bitstream rather than LPCM. The manual mentions it on page 37 although I'm unclear on where it appears in the menu.

The problems is likely due to the fact that the player converts DTS signals to Dolby Digital signals when you have the Mix Audio Option selected instead of HD Audio Output (only when combined with HDMI Audio Mute).

This might fix your problem, but if you want to watch a special feature like picture in picture, you'll need to select Mix Audio to hear the secondary audio track.


If that's not it, I give up, sorry. Good luck!