I have recently purchased a Toshiba A3 HD DVD player and would like someone to let me know if I hooked it up as well as possible. I’ve read so many posts that my head is in a bit of a fog and I’m not sure that I read about anyone hooking up their HD player the same way I did.

I have connected my A3 HDMI output to the HDMI input on my Sony KD-34XS955 set. I then ran the A3 fiber optic audio output to my 990 fiber optic audio input. I selected AUX as the input.

Can someone please let me know if this hookup is best? I think I read a post where gonk recommended setting the surround speakers to large and wonder if I should do the same. Are there other changes I should make?

I didn’t hook up the video to the 990 because I wanted to avoid purchasing more cables. If anyone thinks I should then I will. Everything seems be working well but I’m just not confident about my hook-up.

Thanks for your help.

skitlboy

That approach will work very well for the HD-A3. I have my HD-A2 hooked up in almost exactly the same way (video goes through the 990, but that's because I have several HDMI video sources and one DVI input on my TV).

Thanks very much gonk. Would you recommend setting my surround speakers to large?

Are you talking about the settings in the player? As far as I know, the only time that the player would actually use those speaker settings would be when decoding and then outputting as multichannel PCM via HDMI. When the player decodes DD+ and TrueHD content, it re-encodes as high bitrate Dolby Digital (the HD-A2 uses DTS, but the A3 changed to DD) and I don't believe that it does any signal processing between the decode and the re-encode. If I'm right about that, the settings are disregarded entirely.

Maybe I misunderstood the post I read. I was refering to the 990 settings.

For the 990 setup, it would be a most unusual setup to justify setting surrounds to large. I can't think of a system I've encountered that warranted that. For 99.7829% (plus or minus) of surround setups that have a subwoofer, you are going to be better off running the surrounds and center as small.

What speakers do you have?

Okay. I must have gotten my responses mixed up.

I have McIntosh XR7 fronts and Cambridge Soundworks S300 Multipole surround speakers. I have always set them to small for the 990. The small specs are perfect for my surround speakers. I think I just got the post responses mixed up. I'll keep them set to small.

Thanks very much for your time.

I couldn't find any specs on the XR7, but the S300's should definitely be run small and would probably benefit from a crossover of 100Hz.

gonk - will do.

The McIntosh speakers are a tad old. Still sound great though.

Thanks again for your help.