Primarily a 'sound' question

[houkster]

Newbie here. A few years ago I stepped away from surround sound because of the new house's living room set-up not being very condusive for it. I ended up just hooking up my powered sub-woofer to the Sony (progressive & I believe upscaling) DVD player. I have the Sony Wega 42" lcd projection model. I'm happy enough with that combo sound-wise. Just bought the BDP-S300 Blu-Ray and hooked it up a few days ago. I hooked up the sub-woofer to the appropriate 5.1 jack as I had done before, but got no output from that jack, so I called Sony support - fun! The 1st person I talked to was very matter of fact and told me how to adjust the four audio settings...didn't work still. The 2nd person was also confident, but I had to reverse the 1st 3 settings to the opposite choice......didn't work either. The 3rd person I talked to said that those settings didn't make any difference, and to set the speaker setting to 5.1....it worked, but it seems to me after watching a couple of blu-ray movies that the sound is not quite as 'crisp' and movie theater like as the movie I watched without the subwoofer working. I have the HDMI hooked up and the sound still works without a 2 channel patch, so why would that sound quality change?? Also, is there a reason ALL the jacks don't output at the same time? Do I need to go back in and adjust one or more of the audio choices?

Observations: 1. 1st movie I put in was DVD. The picture size was 3" of black bars top and bottom and 2" black on sides. Tiny! Had to wide zoom my TV setting.
2. 1st blu-ray movie was 3:10 to Yuma. If I had the volume up high enough to hear, the gunfights were super loud! My wife was yelling at me from the back room to turn it down! Is the DRC (? -don't have my owners manual here at work) an adjustment to raise center channel, and do I raise it toward max to lessen the differences in volume?
3. Each of the 3 blu-ray movies I've watched so far seem quite dark to me compared to high-def t.v. programming. Normal? Tried increasing white and lessening black, not much help.
4. In the process of setting up sub-woofer to work, I said 'no' to center channel and rear speakers but didn't try to change 'large speakers' to small. Could or should I?
Sorry for all the questions, but Sony's folks were mostly clueless and would just say any old thing. (last night I got left on hold for 10 minutes while the guy was checking his supervisor - I finally hung up!)

Tks in advance.