i am having trouble figuring out the digital formats on my 990. i have gone through the manual several times and i am sure it is in there somewhere, i just cant find the information i am looking for. i currently have a universal player hooked up via 5.1 analog and coax digital to my 990. i want to listen to soundtracks in pure DD5.1 or DTS WITHOUT applying PLIIx or NEO and i cant figure out how. also, when playing dts disks with DTS 96/24 it wont register on the 990. i know the player is outputting this signal since its 96/24 icon is on. what am i doing wrong? thanks in advance.

on the remote, i think you can hit the "stereo" button a few times to get to the two chanel format.

If you want straight DD or DTS (depending on what you source is sending), just hit the "Dolby" or "DTS" button to scroll through the appropriate options. The first time you hit *any* of the "mode" buttons ("Dolby", "DTS" or "Stereo") it will display on the front panel the current processing mode.

Usually, if I send the 990 a DD signal, it is forced into DD processing, and no PLIIx, etc.

As Otto says, you can scroll through the Dolby or DTS modes with the Dolby and DTS buttons ("Dolby Digital" will be an option at some point for DD tracks and will apply no extra processing, same with "DTS"). Keep in mind that the 990 will remember separate settings for each input for each input format - including separate settings for Dolby 2.0 and Dolby 5.1 (so you could use PLII/IIx with Dolby 2.0 without doing so on Dolby 5.1). I haven't tried any DTS 96/24 stuff since I don't know of any such discs in my collection.

thanks for the replies guys.
when i hit the "Dolby Mode" or "DTS Mode" button on the remote for the respective format i do not get the standard format options. for examply, when i scroll through the dolby modes i only get PLIIx Movie, Music or Movie + Wide. same thing goes for DTS, neo:6 movie/music. and like i stated before, i know i am outputing a standard format from the player..i know i must be missing something somewhere..

I think it my be that you have to change it to upsampling or bypass mode first ,I sometimes get the same problem when I play with the dolby and stereo buttons and it comes up dolby + wide .It drives me crazy

It sounds like your DVD player is set to output PCM instead of bitstream - those options would be what I'd expect from a PCM stereo input, and if the 990 was getting Dolby Digital or DTS bitstreams it would have to decode them that way in order to get any audio.

evan: what i understand from what you are saying is that you scroll through the stereo options and choose upsampling/bypass and then hit the dolby mode button to get the native format?

gonk: i double checked the output and it is bistream. i really dont know whats happening, i didn't have this problem when i used my oppo but this new player has a lot of features and options i am unfamiliar with.

You shouldn't need to go through the stereo options first. The behavior that you are seeing with the 990 suggests that the 990 is getting PCM or even analog stereo - those are the two situations where you would expect to see PLIIx and NEO:6 as the only options. What player are you using? Also, is the "PCM" indicator on the 990's front panel lighting up? (It's near the top left corner.)

By any chance, do you have the universal player also hooked up via L/R analog connections? For that input (DVD, Video 1, whatever your universal is using as its input to the 990) how are you selecting your audio input in the setup menu of the 990 (in the on screen display).

If you're connected with both digital and analog connections from your universal player, but you have "analog" as your input type selected in the 990's OSD, all will seem to work, but you will get the result you are getting. This is the case that gonk suggested -- being connected to the 990 via analog.