So I tired all sorts of ways to make the new DVD player work with the old DAV-C700 and produce 5.1 surround sound, but alas, I failed.  So I did the only thing I could do…I bought a new receiver and speakers.

I got a Sony STR-DE598 which is a 6.1 receiver.  I also got a JBL 5.1 speaker set with powered 8” subwoofer.  It took about two hours to set everything up, and to fix it once I realized I wired the left and right speakers incorrectly (oops).  Then for the big test.  Playing a DVD that has a clearly defined 5.1 soundtrack.

For testing, I used the U2 Go Home concert DVD because I knew it had regular stereo, Dolby Digital, and DTS soundtracks, and because I knew you could clearly hear the difference between them.  I put it in the player, set the receiver to DVD input and auto sound (it will figure out the correct coding by the signal input), and hit play.

As expected, since standard PCM stereo is the default soundtrack on the DVD, the receiver played it in stereo.  It sounded fine, but flat since I was used to the 5.1 version.  I then switched the audio track to the Dolby Digital 5.1 and watched as the receiver did nothing but continue to output in stereo.

There is one point on the DVD where there is a definite difference between the 5.1 soundtracks and the stereo soundtrack. In the middle of playing Until the End of the World, there’s a chick that screams, “Bono! Bono!” at the top of her lungs while he is laying on the walkway that makes the heart. You can only hear that on the 5.1 soundtracks. It’s not there on the stereo version, at all. So I made sure I was using one of the 5.1 versions and fast forwarded to that part of the concert, and there it was, you could hear it, but still the receiver was only outputting in stereo.  Hmm.

So I took the time to actually read the manual and setup all the speaker settings.  Took about 15 minutes with the confusing menu system, but it didn’t make a difference.  No matter what soundtrack I chose, it was always output in stereo.

It was after I pulled out most of my hair that I decided that I should double-check the settings on the DVD player.  I looked at the audio settings and saw that it was set so that if it was playing Dolby Digital or DTS, it would output stereo PCM.  Doh!  I realized that at one point in this whole endeavor, I had reset the DVD settings back to the factory defaults.

I changed the DVD output and everything worked.  Perfectly.

Only one problem.  On the DVD player, when it is playing a multi-channel source, it has a little blue light on the front to let you know it’s playing multi-channel.  The one small problem is that this light is about as bright as two Suns.  And it’s blue.  And it’s right in the front.  Did I mention it’s bright?  I had to tape a piece of tissue over it just to bring it down to an almost acceptable level.