Something strange happened to me tonight. My wife bought me the DVD "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" for Valentines. I love this movie but am having a conflict either between the 1050 or the DVD.

When I put in the DVD or change to different modes (stereo, phantom, natural, ect…) the downmix arrow lights up and "only" the center speaker icon comes on.

I have an optical cable hooked up directly from the DVD player into the 1050. On the DVD disk it says that it is Digital Surround (not 5.1) but should it only play through the center speaker only? Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

I have the same DVD and a JVC amp and the same thing happens on mine. If using the surround mode, only sound appears to come from the center. I prefer to listen to it 2 channel stereo. I believe it must a poor remix for Dolby Digital.

Perhaps the movie is in mono.

If you use ProLogic on a mono source, the algorithm ends up pulling all the sound into the center speaker.

Maybe DD does the same thing if there is only one track present; push it into the center speaker only.

Kind of makes sense, in a way.

I'm pretty sure the original Terminator DVD does the same thing and it is in mono as Matthew has already suggested.

If you look on the back of the DVD case, usually around the bottom, you should see information about the disc. It probably says Dolby Mono or some such wording with regards to the sound encoded on the disc.

If Amazon.com is correct , then the 1050 is doing it's job -- the disc is listed as having a Dolby Digital 1.0 soundtrack, in which case the entire thing should go to the center channel.

I suspect that you could get it to go to the left and right mains only by connecting your DVD player's 2-channel analog outputs to the 1050 and switching to stereo mode...

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Gonk

Thanks for the help with the DVD. I can't believe anyone would encode in DD 1.0. "Sounds" pretty lame to me. Thanks Gonk for the amazon link.

Also curious... why EVER use DD 1.0 or 2.0? Seems to me like you could just have encoded with PCM in mono or stereo... which probably would have sounded better anyway. The only advantage I can see to DD 1.0 would be the compression.

I think the reason they bother to create DD 1.0 and 2.0 tracks is that the DVD format includes DD as a "standard" -- so you are supposed to always have a DD track on the disk, even if you don't use all 5.1 channels.

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Gonk