Two Home Theatre (and PC) Issues
 

Well it looks like I have two separate issues going on with my entire home theatre set.

The first one is a minor one, right now I'm putting my htpc to sleep after about 15-20 mins of idling. The thing is it seems to want to always require me to push the power button to turn wake it back up. The case I have does not have the power button wired up, as well I'm used to just sleeping the hard drive so I would just move the mouse or tap the keyboard a couple of times to wake it.

How do I fix it for this, or is sleep/hibernate still utterly broken in Win 7? I am planning on looking through the manual for my board's bios to see if there is anything mentioned about wake on usb.

The second problem is a bit bigger. It seems that my receiver (Onkyo TX-SR508), which is about 1.5 years old (maybe closer to around a year and a few months) doesn't seem to want to play back the voice tracks of any audio that is set to DTS or Dolby, even though it supports it (and would play it in the past). I have tried this on three separate machines in several different programs (xbmc, vlc, winamp) with the same results.

The only thing I have not had the chance to do is test it with my 360 to see if it's the computers' set up or the receiver itself. I would also like to note that this issue occurs with the audio signal over hdmi as well as spdif.

Any help/advice would be great on both issues. I just hope the receiver isn't a dud as I don't know how long onyx's warranties are.

Until you try your 360 or a dvd/bluray player I won't help you :P

I think I figured out problem 1, it seems they disable waking up from sleep states in the bios.

http://images.anandtech.com/gallerie...1267_575px.jpg

I figure if I enable Resume from S3 by USB Device wiggling the mouse or hitting a few keys on the keyboard should awake my htpc from its slumber? I'm surprised this was disabled by default as I've never had another motherboard configured from the factory that way.

I'll test it with the 360 once I get home from work, but I have a big suspicion that something on the receiver blew.. knowing my luck with receivers.

Well i think it's the receiver. Just ran a Dolby and DTS movie through my 360 (off a DvD that has them) and it will not playback voice audio tracks, music and background works fine though.

There ya go! So now I would say try doing this.

Unplug receiver. Hit power button to discharge unit. Wait say 15 minutes then turn it back on. Other than that see if there is a way to do a full reset of the unit.

I'll try that later when I'm not using it. Is it possible it has gotten itself stuck in between modes? I can't see components failing already in just that mode.

I had a similar problem with my Yamaha, but it was intermittent. Restored it to factory defaults and re-configured it, and now it's working like a champ again.

I just restored it to factory defaults and it's doing the same thing. It'll only play audio back if its PCM (any only the 2.1 channel version of it, not the 5.1 like I have set up and recognized and reconfigured), aka no dts or Dolby like it used to. Guess something broke on it, oh joy...

Well looks like if I want to RMA it I have to send it to Montreal, I'm guessing that's about 50$ to ship as receivers aren't the lightest things in the world.

I could try listing my receiver set to play all channels simulated 5.1 (aka stereo through all the speakers) and pick up a new one, or RMA and sit without sound for my pc/htpc for who knows how long...

Don't be cheap. RMA the thing its not even a year old