VSX-520 + PS3 + Optical: Strange Clipping

2869 Views 8 Replies 4 Participants Last post by gukid, Oct 14, 2010

gukid

Discussion Starter · Oct 10, 2010

Having a strange issue with a new amp. Went from a Quest amp that died to a Pioneer VSX-520. Hooked up the same way, using an optical cable. Everything is working great except for one small thing.

When in the main crossbar of the PS3, normally there is a sound effect that plays when you switch between options, and otherwise, it is silent. If I wait a second, and then try to move between options, the amp won't play the first 1 or 2 sound effects. It's almost as if the optical goes into sleep mode, and then has to "wake-up" to play the sounds. The only problem, is this happens after like, 1 second, so it's constantly omitting these effects. I've tested hooking up the ps3 using analog inputs, and this doesn't happen. It also didn't happen with my Quest amp (not that I'm saying the Quest amp was better...).

It's not really a huge problem, but I'm worried that anything else that starts to play after a tiny delay of silence, might also be clipped at the beginning by a half-second or so. Unless of course most signals would be sending some sort of data during silence to prevent this from happening?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

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gukid

Discussion Starter · #2 · Oct 10, 2010

Just a bit more info.

I got out my ps2, which also has optical out, and found a game with a silent menu with sound effects, and was able create the same problem. Strangely though, the sound effect isn't omitted, it's actually just a lot quieter than normal. I'd say plays at about 50% volume, and then everything goes back up to 100%. If I wait about 2 seconds or so, I can get it to do the same thing consistently.

This made me think it was something with the dynamic range features, that prevent things from getting too loud too quickly? So I tried disabling the dynamic range on the amp, but it didn't change anything. I've tried disabling and re-enable lots of features already. Like running in "pure direct" mode, which removes and dsp effects and running in stereo mode, nothing seems to fix it other than using the analog rca inputs for sound, which really won't work for me :\

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gukid

Discussion Starter · #4 · Oct 11, 2010

I have a 27" CRT TV...

Component for the video, Optical for the audio.

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gukid

Discussion Starter · #5 · Oct 13, 2010

Problem solved by buying an hdmi cable, and having the ps3 output audio to hdmi and video to component.

Still have to wonder if maybe something is wrong with the optical ports however, but it really could be a combination of how this amp deals with optical signals, and how the ps3 is sending them out. Wish someone else had some input on this.

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gukid

Discussion Starter · #6 · Oct 14, 2010

Correction, created a different problem. HDMI got rid of the problem of the volume clipping following any bit of silence over a second or so, but introduced a new problem of when I play music and the amp switches between whatever it was on, and the stereo mode (it doesn't indicate anywhere that it's doing this) the first half a second or so of the audio is clipped. So, for example if on my PS3 I go onto a shared media drive, play an mp3, the very beginning is cut-off. This doesn't happen on optical or analog, which surprises me because I would think optical would have to do the same thing.

So at this point, I'm just considering returning the unit. Does anyone have any suggestions at all?

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gukid

Discussion Starter · #9 · Oct 14, 2010

Thanks for the reply's!

57: I've just started reading through the links you posted. A lot of good information to parse through, so I'll see what I can discover.

bogman: Sounds like you're having the exact same problem as I am, with the optical connection, which is actually reassuring in a way. When I switched over to hdmi for audio, that problem went away, but a new one was introduced where it clipped the first bit of sound when (I'm assuming) it's switching audio output modes. But only hdmi, and not optical or analog... I'm going to play with the audio output settings in the ps3, and try to restrict what types of output it can do to see if I can get any real solution out of this.

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