Ax3 - Help?

[Papa]

Hi all

Any help for a noob appreciated. I just bought myself some Mordant Short 500s and wired them up through an Ax3. My problem is the amp doesn't seem to run THX properly. I don't seem to be getting more than the occasional noise from the rear speakers, and the manual isn't a lot of help.

Can anyone point me in the directio of a good helpfile or FAQ?

thanks

[Jonas]

When you run the auto-setup on the AX3 do you get a signal (white noise) from the rear speakers? If not, then you might have the wiring wrong. Check this first.



Also how are you connecting your DVD to the amp?



And also remember that some DVDs only make occasional use of the rears, so make sure you test it with something you know uses them a lot (e.g Star Wars Attack of the Clones).



The THX mode is just a processing mode, which does several clever things to make things sound better according to Mr Lucas. What you areally want to look for is what the disk your are playing is encoded as. If you look on the back of the DVD it will say eg. Dolby Digital 5.1, it should then reflect this on the front panel of the amp. If it doesn't you might have another connection problem.

[Slartibartfast]

Another thing to check if you haven't run a 5.1 system before is that the DVD player is set via its menu to output DD and/or DTS bitstreams. Some DVD players by default do not output these bitstreams - instead they default to 2 channel PCM digital like a CD. If this is the case you will get very little from the centre and rear speakers! ;)~;-)~:wink:

[Papa]

Thanks for the tips guys.



I was rather hoping that the AX3 would auto-detect the sound format...



Point noted re. the disc format. I was trying to set up on Black Hawk Down (because there are lots of bullets & rockets whizzing from left to right) - I didn't check the sound format. When I get home friday I'll use Attack of the Clones.



The autosetup function requires the TV to be slaved to the amp, which i haven't managed to do yet. (After forking out over £200 on cables!)

DVD is set to the amp with an s-video and twin phonos.

[Jonas]

For true surround sound you need to connect the DVD player to the AX3 using a digital lead (Optical or Coax) with two phono's for sound the Amp will only get a 2 chanel signal and wont give you full surround sound.