Home Theater Components

How to hook up my new flat panel and other components to my home theater.?

I have a new lcd tv with 4 hdmi inputs but only one audio output (optical). Can I hook all of my components (xbox, playstation, satellite box) to the tv via hdmi and then use the 1 optical audio out to route the audio through my home theater surround sound (which only has the 1 audio in - optical). Then I guess just mute the tv. I would test this but the tv hasn't arrived yet and i want to get the in-wall cabling done ahead of time.

Public Comments

1. The best way is to hook everything through a surround sound receiver and run a single HDMI cable from the receiver to the TV
2. It really depends on the TV. Many TVs will NOT pass HDMI audio out (especially 5.1) to s/pdif due to copy protection issues, but others will. Check the User Manual of your TV. However, even if it does not pass it, you can always get an optical s/pdif switch; connect all inputs to the switch and then the output to the HT.
3. Connect every thing to the tv. In some cases like your XBOX or PS will not pass the audio to the tv and out again. In this case use an optical cable from the XBOX or PS to the HT (you will have to switch back and forth on which one you use). Hope this will help you out.
4. Hardly any TVs pass *surround sound* from one component to another. So the answer is probably "no". You could pass two-channel audio via the optical cable though. Or you can buy an optical cable switcher. You have run into the #1 problem with those home theater in a box systems. If you look at the questions in this section many of them address this limitation. For this reason I never recommend HTIBs unless they are based on a receiver rather than a player.