I recently purchased a used 950 and have 2 setup questions.
I am trying to use an old receiver to drive/control speakers in my kitchen. I tried to tie in the old receiver to the 950 using the tape output to the CD in on the old receiver but it does not work. I also hooked it up to the zone out and turned on multi zone without sucess. Any ideas?

Second question. How should I set up the DVD player output to the 950? Should the optical connection be set as PCM or stream/pcm ? I tried a DVD with 5.1 on it but the 950 does not show 5.1

Thanks for your patience and help.

John

First question: Are the sources that you are trying to listen to in the kitchen connected to the 950 with a digital audio cable? The 950's tape output and second zone output are both analog, and both are separate from the digital audio signal path. If the sources you are trying to pass on to the kitchen are connected with a digital audio cable (coaxial or optical) only, try running a set of analog audio cables from the source to the 950 and see if that gets you on track.

Second question: you don't want to force the DVD player to PCM - it needs to be able to output a bitstream signal in order to carry the Dolby Digital or DTS soundtrack to the 950. Setting the player's digital output to PCM (the digital audio signal format used for CD's) will cause it to downconvert the DD signal.

Let us know if either of these issues are still causing you trouble, or if anything else crops up.

Gonk.
First item,
I want the receiver to take whatever is playing on the 950. The receiver is connected by an analog connection. On the 950 I have 3 devices connected by digital connections. My VCR is connected to the 950 by analog and the zone out is connected to the receiver CD in and I still get no sound.

Second item
I will update the DVD player and let you know how it works.

To use any source from the 950 through the receiver, you'll need to connect analog cables from all of them (even though you won't use those analog connections at the 950). For the moment, though, we can use the VCR's analog connection as a test for troubleshooting purposes.

If you want to simply "duplicate" the 950's active source in the kitchen, the tape output would be a better output to use since it will automatically follow the 950's active source and it will leave all volume control in the hands of the receiver. If you want to have be able to listen to one source at the 950 and a different source in the kitchen, the way you have it hooked up now is the way to go. For now, we'll focus on the latter case.

Get the VCR fired up and playing something (either with the VCR's TV tuner or a tape). Now get the 950's remote and get multizone turned on and switched to the VCR's input (page 36 in the 950's manual): press MULTI in the remote, use the < and > buttons to switch "MULTI-ZONE" from "OFF" to "ON" (the little LED to the right of the standby/mute LED will come on to let you know that multizone is on), press MULTI again and use the < and > buttons to select the desired input for the multi-zone output ("VCR" in this case), press MULTI two more times to skip past the "MUTE" option and get to the "VOLUME" control. I'd probably set the volume somewhere around -10dB initially, since there's a second volume control downstream. Once you've done all of that at the 950, go to the receiver in the kitchen and see what you can get.

Ok. Here is what I did. I moved the 950 output to the tape out. Selected VCR on the 950 and presto I am happy again! So for my digital sources I will need to run an analogue to the 950 as well. Please correct me if that is not correct.

I will also work on the 5.1 dts/dolby setup later on this evening.

Many thanks,
John

You are correct on the arrangement for the receiver in the kitchen. The second zone is also an option if you want to have independent source control in the future, but what you have now will work very well once you add analog connections from the digital sources.

Good luck with the DVD player settings.