I recently bought the 950/7100 combo after ten years with a Kenwood Pro Logic receiver. Wow - what a difference (to put it mildly). Anyway, I'm still trying to get my brain around all the digital movie formats, and had two questions, both related to movies encoded with Dolby EX:

1) Should I expect the 950 to detect EX and automatically switch to that flavor of processing? I've had to manually switch to EX - maybe that's perfectly normal.

2) I've recently been comparing DD EX mode to CES (DD CR-C). I've found that the rear channel material is much more prominent with CES. I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this, or perhaps I have a setup/calibration problem? I used the DVE disk to calibrate everything using a sound meter.

Thanks for the help.

Bill

1. Many Dolby EX titles lack flags to identify themselves as Dolby EX, forcing you to manually enable EX processing. Perfectly normal.

2. I've noticed that CES does present more substantial rear surround material than Dolby EX, particularly on Dolby 5.1 sources. Nothing wrong with your setup that I can see. In fact, I typically have DD CR-C as my default mode for Dolby Digital soundtracks on the DVD player -- I only use Dolby EX on titles that I know are EX encoded.

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I was wondering about this same question myself. If I use the DD-CR-C setting on a Dolby-EX disk do I lose that 6th channels information or does it just get split to the 2 rear channels? I don't want to be droping that information by mistake. Anyone know for sure?

Lasher