TV, Receiver and HD Antenna

[youra6]

If I want to watch OTA via HD Antenna and want to get sound through my bookshelves speakers, how do I go about doing this? The Antenna takes coaxial.

I do not have a cable box, or Satellite box, just a HDTV antenna.

I was thinking the only way to get this to work is if I use a separate optical or analog cables. Am I right?

Thanks all!

[tesseract]

The way I do it is to run the TV audio RCA out to an input on my integrated amplifier.

EDIT: One of the needs on my new TV was RCA outs. I am a 2 channel guy. I realize that most TV's these days lack the RCA's out. Hopefully you can go HDMI out to a receiver.

[fanuminski]

I am using an optical out to my receiver at present -
the sound is still great, but eventually want to
upgrade the receiver to accept HDMI.
-M

[youra6]

Is it possible via HDMI? I thought it was not because the input on the TV do not match up.

To elaborate: If I watch TV, the source is on ANT/CABLE. If I want audio to come through HDMI, I have to select the input to HDMI 1.

If it is possible to get sound via HDMI, how do I do it? Thanks for all the answers so far!

[HopefulFred]

Here's the whole story (which I don't think really contradicts much here, I'm just going to lay it out for you all at once).

The ATSC (DTV) signal your antenna receives (which, for the record works like any TV antenna always has, the FCC just got rid of most of the VHF bandwidth and reassigned the UHF to shuffle a little free space for other purposes) has audio and video together (obviously). For most TV content these days (especially prime time, but also including a growing number of commercials and less high-profile content) the audio is Dolby Digital. The ATSC tuner in your TV (assuming you run the Antenna cable into your TV directly, and not into some other tuner, like a TiVo) decodes the DD and does one of two things with it: downmixes it to stereo for playback by the built in speakers or transmission via stereo output (RCA), OR simply passes the audio signal along, unmolested, to the digital output (usually optical). The clear advantage in this case goes to the digital (S/PDIF) connection because is retains discrete audio.

This is virtually universal for HDTVs in the US, but you should put eyeballs on the back of the set and confirm the output is present. If you have trouble identifying what you're looking for, post a model number and I'll see if I can confirm for you.

The new show in town is ARC (Audio Return Channel). This allows the same HDMI cable that normally carries video from your AVR to your TV to work in the other direction to carry audio from the ATSC tuner (not other sources, except built in DVD players or internet widgets in some cases, I think) back to the AVR. For this to work you need a TV and an AVR that both explicitly support the ARC component of HDMI 1.4a. You can use any common high-speed HDMI cable, but will probably be limited to certain ports on your compliant equipment (that is, it's likely not all ports on an AVR are equipped to deal with the incoming signal) You should note, there is no sonic advantage to ARC - S/PDIF carries the same exact signal as the HDMI but requires the extra cable in stead of all the fancy new equipment.Official Link :cool:

[fanuminski]

:whs:

thanks!

I do think , youra6 , that it may be helpful
to post what model TV and/or receiver you are using.

-M

[youra6]

I don't have anything fancy, just a TX-SR508 and a Toshiba G300U LCD TV

[HopefulFred]

I'm sure you've got it figured all out at this point, but just to complete the thread: Optical in your ticket. Monoprice has it for less than $2.00:salute:

[youra6]

I'm sure you've got it figured all out at this point, but just to complete the thread: Optical in your ticket. Monoprice has it for less than $2.00:salute:

Uh huh I got it figured out :) Ended up using an old optical cable and it works great.