Amnesia
Member
Someone over on AVForums has a BRAVIA 8 II feeding a stereo rig over TOSLINK and reckons it sounds worse than the eighteen-year-old Sony LCD it replaced. Chain is TV, optical, DAC, Cyrus 8vs2, PMC DB1s. He has already ruled the DAC out by trying an Arcam irDAC and a Cambridge DacMagic 200M and getting the same result from both. The telling comparison is a Shield going straight into the DacMagic over USB against that same Shield routed through the TV over HDMI and back out over optical. Direct wins.
That points at the set, and it usually is the set. Everything arriving over HDMI gets decoded, resampled and pushed through the TV's own audio chain before it reaches the optical socket, and that chain exists to serve the built-in speakers. Dialogue enhancement, auto volume, any dynamic range setting, room calibration if the set has run it - plenty of that stays active on the digital output even after you have set the format to PCM. Worth walking the whole audio menu with everything on off or standard before blaming the socket.
His plan to test eARC through an S/PDIF extractor is the right next move, because it separates the optical path from the processing that happens upstream of it. If eARC sounds the same, the socket is innocent and the DSP is the culprit.
The question nobody in that thread asked: what is routing sources through the TV buying him in the first place? If the DAC has spare inputs, feed it directly and let the TV handle only its own tuner. Has anyone here actually compared a recent Sony's optical output against a direct digital feed, rather than assuming?
That points at the set, and it usually is the set. Everything arriving over HDMI gets decoded, resampled and pushed through the TV's own audio chain before it reaches the optical socket, and that chain exists to serve the built-in speakers. Dialogue enhancement, auto volume, any dynamic range setting, room calibration if the set has run it - plenty of that stays active on the digital output even after you have set the format to PCM. Worth walking the whole audio menu with everything on off or standard before blaming the socket.
His plan to test eARC through an S/PDIF extractor is the right next move, because it separates the optical path from the processing that happens upstream of it. If eARC sounds the same, the socket is innocent and the DSP is the culprit.
The question nobody in that thread asked: what is routing sources through the TV buying him in the first place? If the DAC has spare inputs, feed it directly and let the TV handle only its own tuner. Has anyone here actually compared a recent Sony's optical output against a direct digital feed, rather than assuming?
