I have a sony receiver and it was hooked to my old tv, ps3, and dvd player, with them and my cable all running to it and then out to the monitor. yesterday i bought an LG plasma screen and now i ran the RCA from my cable to the receiver and then from my receiver i set it up like my last tv with everything going to the receiver then using monitor out to the tv, but now this will not work. i can get the rca cables to work only. if i use any hdmi cables its a black screen or says no signal. if you have an answer for this it would be great but i was wondering can i just run everything to the tv and then run an optical cable from the tv to the receiver and get everything going through the tv to come out of my surround sound???
. "i was wondering can i just run everything to the tv and then run an optical cable from the tv to the receiver and get everything going through the tv to come out of my surround sound???"
The newer LG plasmas will pass audio from its optical output from digital sources only (HDMI). It will not upconvert any analog audio source to digital and feed it out on optical. Furthermore, the audio it passes out to optical is stereo only, unless that signal is from an over-the-air signal received via antenna, or any unencrypted cable channel received on basic (no box) cable. Only in very limited circumstances is it advantageous to use a TV as a system switcher.
Again, if all your sources support HDMI, then you could run those three cables to the TV and the TV's optical output will give you a signal, but stereo only. This happens because the TV combines the 5.1 signal coming in to stereo because that's all it needs for its internal speakers.
I, or somebody else here could give you more specific help with hookup, but we really need a model number for the Sony receiver and the plasma, plus what hookup options you have available on the DVD player and the cable. .