New setup questions

[blackadder]

I'm waiting delivery of a pioneer vsx-916 which i've just purchased of the forums and was wondering which would be the best way to setup/connect my equipment for sound and video, i currently have an xbox (used to stream stuff from pc) , xbox 360, cable box, humax pvr, dvd player and vcr all connected by scart, my tv is a sony kf-42sx200u which has 3 scarts, i could possibly leave the vcr off as i havn't used it in 12mths.

thanks

 

[davepuma]

I presume you didn't have any form of surround sound setup prior to your new purchase? If you didn't the only thing that will change is hooking up the audio from each source to the amp which will obviously depend on what is available. The Xbox and Xbox 360 will connect via optical. The DVD player will either be digi-coax or optical. If you run out of optical inputs, you can always buy a toslink splitter or convert one source to digi-coax using a suitable converter box. The rest will output in stereo only, although I don't know what sort of cable box you have as I have no experience of cable TV, so I would simply connect a pair of analogue phonos for the rest from your TV, that way you get surround sound (not 5.1 but 2.0 channel mixed to give you Dolby Pro Logic) from whatever is playing on the TV. If you're not using some form of RGB SCART switching box, I would ensure that whatever you use the least (or don't require a good picture on) is connected to the 3rd SCART socket on the TV as it is not RGB compatible.