Connecting Blu-ray player

[bighouse]

I have a sony S360 blu ray player and an old receiver without HDMI ports. My question is, can I hook up HDMI to my tv and run an optical audio cable to my receiver or is my receiver now a big paperweight?

[HiDefRev]

NO !!!! You NEVER use your TV as a distribution hub. The optical output on your TV will ONLY send 2.0 stereo out from your components. The best you can do at this point, until you get a new receiver, is to run HDMI to your TV for video and run optical audio from your Blu-Ray to your receiver. Of course, you will ONLY get the core Dobly or DTS tracks over the optical cable as the lossless DolbyTrueHD and DTS MasterAudio found on Blu-Ray discs are only transmitted via HDMI.

[bighouse]

OK, thanks. That is what I meant to say is running an optical from my blu ray to the receiver. Sorry for any confusion and thanks for telling me the information I needed to know.

[emoxley]

If your receiver has 5.1/7.1 multi-channel analog inputs on back, you can get a blu ray player with those outputs, and listen to the HD audio soundtracks that way. But, if you don't have access to one already, it would probably be just as cheap to get a new receiver, that would work with the player you have. This is mainly FYI.............

[Zman2k2]

Originally Posted by HiDefRev

NO !!!! You NEVER use your TV as a distribution hub. The optical output on your TV will ONLY send 2.0 stereo out from your components. The best you can do at this point, until you get a new receiver, is to run HDMI to your TV for video and run optical audio from your Blu-Ray to your receiver. Of course, you will ONLY get the core Dobly or DTS tracks over the optical cable as the lossless DolbyTrueHD and DTS MasterAudio found on Blu-Ray discs are only transmitted via HDMI.

Wrong. You can transmit DTS HD-MA and TrueHD over analog output from a player capable from decoding them.

Originally Posted by emoxley

If your receiver has 5.1/7.1 multi-channel analog inputs on back, you can get a blu ray player with those outputs, and listen to the HD audio soundtracks that way. But, if you don't have access to one already, it would probably be just as cheap to get a new receiver, that would work with the player you have. This is mainly FYI.............

No it wouldn't. If you read the first post, he stated he has a S360, which does NOT have 5.1/7.1 outputs. It comes with analog 2.0 outputs.

bighouse, you'll be fine using the optical output on your player to send audio to your receiver. Make sure that you select "Optical" and "Bitsteam" from the audio menu on your player, to get the best possible sound for your situation.