Drooch
Established Member
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2012
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- 84
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I have a ub820 connected to a chunky old amp - the Denon AVC-A1SE - via analogue cables. My speakers are the reasonably big KEF THX Reference range.
I was watching my Jurassic Park UHD and found the audio less meaty than another 5.1 system I have which is newer, all HDMI, but with a cheaper amp and much smaller speakers.
As an experiment, I hooked up an optical cable from the ub820 to the AVC-A1SE and the sound was much bigger with more bass all round. For example, there‘s a moment when the raptor pokes its head under the kitchen surface and knocks over some plastic tupperware with its snout - when it quickly retracts its head there is a ’whoosh’ sound, and it always sounded ’big’ and bassy on my small system. Not so when I use the analogue cables, but through the optical it sounded great.
This baffled me because I understood that analogue gave almost HDMI levels of HD-audio, and optical was lossy and to be avoided. The optical also allows me to transform stereo into Pro-Logic and Neo, which the AVC-A1SE can’t do through its analogue inputs.
Does anyone know why I’m getting much better audio through optical than analogue?
An additional point that might be relevant - when I do a speaker channel test on the ub820, it skips the subwoofer test (when I do this on the amp, the subwoofer is present). I wonder if this is related to the weak bass I’m getting through the analogues? When I feel the subwoofer during a movie it is rumbling away, but its not nearly as active as when I go optical.
Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.
I was watching my Jurassic Park UHD and found the audio less meaty than another 5.1 system I have which is newer, all HDMI, but with a cheaper amp and much smaller speakers.
As an experiment, I hooked up an optical cable from the ub820 to the AVC-A1SE and the sound was much bigger with more bass all round. For example, there‘s a moment when the raptor pokes its head under the kitchen surface and knocks over some plastic tupperware with its snout - when it quickly retracts its head there is a ’whoosh’ sound, and it always sounded ’big’ and bassy on my small system. Not so when I use the analogue cables, but through the optical it sounded great.
This baffled me because I understood that analogue gave almost HDMI levels of HD-audio, and optical was lossy and to be avoided. The optical also allows me to transform stereo into Pro-Logic and Neo, which the AVC-A1SE can’t do through its analogue inputs.
Does anyone know why I’m getting much better audio through optical than analogue?
An additional point that might be relevant - when I do a speaker channel test on the ub820, it skips the subwoofer test (when I do this on the amp, the subwoofer is present). I wonder if this is related to the weak bass I’m getting through the analogues? When I feel the subwoofer during a movie it is rumbling away, but its not nearly as active as when I go optical.
Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.