Need some help getting audio from receiver to speakers

[jimrawr]

I am trying to connect some polk audio speakers to my receiver (Pioneer VSX-818V) but I cannot get audio out of them for the life of me. Here is how things are connected:

HDMI from DirecTV to Receiver
HDMI from Receiver to TV
RCA Cables going to both speakers

I have an optical cable which I tried running from DirecTV to Reciever and that changed nothing.

I DO have sound coming from my TV, so clearly the receiver is getting the sound, but for some reason not distributing the sound to the speaker via the RCAs and only sending sound to TV via HDMI.

Can anyone offer some advice? I'm going crazy here for the last couple hours..

 

[queequeg99]

RCA cables to connect the speakers? How did you do that? Did you snip the ends off the cables? If you're lucky, the center conductor in an RCA cable will be 18ga, but they can easily be thinner (24ga), which could conceivably cause an issue if you have a longer run of wire or low impedence speakers. Good quality thick speaker wire is pretty cheap. I typically get generic stuff through monoprice, but in a pinch I just run to Home Depot.

 

[jimrawr]

Sorry didnt mean RCA cables to speakers.. Just regular old speaker cables. I think my receiver may be dead. I did a hard reset and tried a speaker test through the receiver and neither of them made any noise.

 

[Anubis]

are your speaker cables connected to the correct terminals on the AVR?
do you have a "Zone" or "A/B" selector switch on the AVR that is set to the wrong one

 

[Mike64]

When, and in what configuration, was the receiver last known to be working? Seems kinda unlikely that it would just quietly "die" while sitting on a shelf unused and/or without squawking at least once as it died, if in use...

 

[jimrawr]

It was last used a couple years ago but it sat on doing nothing this whole time

 

[Mike64]

It was last used a couple years ago but it sat on doing nothing this whole time

That argues against it being "dead", then… About the only thing that really could've "quietly rotted" is the power supply capacitors, which obviously hasn't happened.

[Edited]
I did a Google search on your receiver just to familiarize myself with its specs, and pretty much the first thing I saw was this Amazon review. Which seems to be saying that particular model simply wasn't designed to "get there from here". Since it was sitting in a closet for a couple of years, I'll spare you the otherwise obligatory "RTFM comment", but according to its page 17, that is indeed the case:

VSX-818V model only:To hear audio from your HDMI component through this system, make analog and/or digital connections as necessary.
On the rear panel, you must connect to the audio jacks from a set of audio/video inputs (for example, DVR/VCR as shown in the illustration).
• Without this connection, HDMI audio will still be output from your TV or flat panel TV (though no sound will be heard from this receiver).

If the DirecTV box doesn't have a separate digital audio output, presumably you can use an HDMI splitter and HDMI-to-digital-audio adapter?

But here's a big "hmmm"… I did a Google search on your receiver just to familiarize myself with its specs, and pretty much the first thing I saw was this Amazon review. Which seems to be saying that particular model simply wasn't designed to "get there from here". I know nothing about HDMI-capable receivers in general (I only recently bought my first HDTV!), but just as a matter of electronics, it doesn't seem surprising that it could be able to pass-through the full HDMI signal to the TV, while not itself being capable of decoding the audio portion of the signal. Given the basically universal adoption of a fairly sophisticated "home theater" model at even the low end of consumer TV set-ups, and the trickle-down of what would've been considered higher-end features 8 years ago, it would seem really strange in a current model, but not so much in such an "old" one?

If you haven't already, check the manual, and/or try the radio or a connected audio-only source - either or both analog and digital. That'll tell you if if the problem is in the amplifier/output circuitry, or the HDMI-signal related stuff. If it is the case that that the receiver simply can't decode the audio, you should be able to work around it with appropriate (and relatively inexpensive) splitters and an HDMI-to-SPDIF adapter.