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One of my concerns before migrating to my HT system was the effect of passing the video output of my HD cable box and DVD player (actually Blu-ray) through my new receiver. In my old system, these sources were connected directly to my Sony XBR2 TV. As an audiophile, I believe direct connections are always best. Well my actual experience is quite positive. Not only do I see no degradation in HD picture quality, it may be a bit better.
So here is my question: is there any processing of the signal from my cable box and Blu-ray player by my Marantz SR4003 receiver before it routs it to my TV? All connections are HDMI.
Follow Ups:
I know what you mean, old habits die hard. In the "old days", when the video signals were analog, and the AVRs had limited video bandwidth, it was almost always better to connect directly to the display.
But with digital HDMI, it really makes no difference. As long as your AVR doesn't do anything weird. Almost all have a pass-through mode. It's usually more convenient to go through the AVR too, so that you get AVR menus superimposed on whatever you're watching. And with current AVRs and their large video bandwidths, even putting analog video signals through them doesn't show any degradation (to me, with mine anyway).
The advantage of doing HDMI straight to the display is generally you can calibrate a particular display input. Most people get around that by calibrating a display "mode" to a particular source so they can still go through the AVR.
My AVR menus do not show up on my TV because I have all HDMI video connections. I would need to have a s-video or component connection to see the menus on my set. It is not much of a problem but I was wondering if my Marantz AVR was unique in this regard.
As Kal said, it depends. Depends on when your AVR was made, like in that HDMI transition time when most people would have been using component for high quality video.I got stuck in this bind before too, except in the days when most were using S-video/composite: the AVR menus didn't come out over component.
By "most people" I don't mean us necessarily LOL, but the general public.
What I did was put a little macro in my remote. Still use a similar macro now for getting AVR menus while watching OTA TV; since that is internally generated by the built-in tuner, it doesn't use an "input" so external video (from AVR) doesn't display. Anyway, what the one-button macro does is split the screen and call up the AVR menu and show it in the little one. And another one-button macro undoes all that. So it's no more "tedious" than calling up the AVR menu, just takes a tad longer. Another way is to have the macro switch between TV inputs, in your case between the HDMI and component ones. Why I did it the way I mentioned is because I specifically want the OTA source program to be playing since mostly I am making audio settings changes with the AVR. I'm sure you can figure out similar that suits.
Edits: 02/20/09
As far as I can tell, your AVR has no ability to modify/process HDMI video and acts simply as a switch. Some AVRs can do more than that.
Kal
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