I have a (hopefully) small problem that just started a day or two ago: I have a 3805 connected to Sony 70" XBR connected to 5.1 surround sound speakers. Has worked flawlessly until now. When I used to change channels with my remote control, the receiver used to change as the channel's input changed. I have Direct TV with the HD-250 receiver. The input signals, or lights, on my Denon 3805 would light according to not only the number of "speakers" or channels that particular channel was sending, but the receiver would also automatically re-display the type of Dolby that particular TV channel was sending. Now, my receiver doesn't 'react' when I change TV channels. It simply stays on "Dolby PL IIx cine" and the indicator lights to the left of this do not light up.
Now, when I play a DVD, it does still change and 'interpret' the new signal being input to it, and the input lights or signals to the left of the Dolby Digital description light up showing that indeed all 5.1 channels are being sent data or audio.
I've read the user guide extensively and trouble-shot it for about 3 hours yesterday. Hopefully someone in this forum is familiar enought to find the fix for this. I don't know, maybe DirecTV started sending simply a "digital" signal only, and isn't differentiating whether it's Dolby DTS, Pro Logic, etc.
My settings are: Input mode = auto and I use fiber optic input #1 on my Denon 3805.
When I press the "I.Mode" button on the remote and cycle through the auto, PCM, and DTS, the only difference made is that I get no sound when using the DTS mode, and that's probably attributable to TV channels not broadcasting in DTS. The reason I leave it on auto is just that: the receiver used to change not only the number of signal lights on the left hand side of the display when I changed channels, it changed the description of what the data incoming was as well. The receiver used to make a tiny clicking noise each time a channel was changed because it was interpreting a different channel's incoming data stream. For example, no matter what content or show was on Channel 78 or 79 (channel 78 is HDnet movies and 79 is HDnet), the receiver would display Dolby Digital and the 5.1 signal lights would light up to the left of the description, telling me it was sending the correct data frequencies to the correct 5.1 speakers. Another example: If I was watching an HD channel on NBC, which would be channel 12.1 (DirecTV), all 5.1 lights would be lit during the show's broadcast, but when a commercial came on, it would change to just two signal lights. This told me the commercial was probably only broadcast in 2.1 stereo (I think anyway).
Hope that makes sense. By the way, do you know if you can manipulate the audio setup output settings on any DirecTV box? I will check, but it doesn't seem like I did that when I set up this system a year ago.
Thanks for the tip on checking the output settings on the DirecTV box. When I went to the settings and output, it gives two choices: Dolby Digital or DD to PCM. It must have somehow been changed to DD to PCM. I changed it back to simply Dolby Digital and all is well. There is peace and serenity again. I'm glad for this forum. Otherwise, I'd be bald by this weekend tearing my hair out of my head.
Doug: Kewl... some times when these cable/TV boxes receive a firmware update (automagically) I have noticed that they default back to some standard settings. That may be why the Dolby Digital mode went back to PCM for you.
It has happened to me on my Cablevision DVR set top cable box in the past. Glad that worked for you. The hint to me was that your DVD player was still being AUTO recognized....
The clicking from the receiver was it switching from a digital source to analog and vise versa. So it is obviously on either complete analog or digital. How does your receiver decode a Dolby 2.0 signal? Does it display Dolby Digital 2/0/0 or does it automatically do Dolby Pro Logic Ci? Do you have channels that have Dolby 5.1 tracks? How are those played?