I have an old Panasonic Viera plasma TV 58" with no HDMI ARC and Pioneer AVR model VSX 1325K, which has HDMI ARC. I connected

[nenadkitic]

I also have Panasonic BD55 bluray player that I connected to Pioneer AVR via HDMI cable.
I connected Pre-out of Pioneer AVR to the external tube amplifier Fatman Carbon, to which I connected PSB Image B4 speakers.
When I spin a CD in the bluray player, I get the sound on the PSB speakers.
But when I spin a bluray movie, I only get a portion of the sound, e.g. some surround, and occasionally, very little dialogue.

What should I do to get the sound both when spinning CDs and movies?

 

[americanaudiophile]

Did you set up the receiver? If you set it for no center, rear or sub you should get stereo regardless of the source.
The BD player is set to output in 5.1
You can change the output of the BD player to PCM stereo in it's set up menu and that will also work..

 

[nenadkitic]

That is very interesting, but I didn't try. I followed another solution that advised to buy a digital audio cable and connect my TV to AVR using that cable and that did the trick. I now have both CD and movies sound. Before that, I tried to connect my TV and AVR with audio component or composite no sure which one (I used red and white cables), but didn't get the sound from movies, not sure why (I mean, whether it is digital audio or component audio, it is just different transport and both should work, but only digital optical cable worked).

But this advice you provided is interesting as it does not require investment into a digital optical cable. If I have time, But that would mean, I think, that I would have to change the setup of BD player each time before I switch to movies or to CD. What I am not sure is how that digital optical audio cable makes all the difference? so 5.1 comes to AVR via HDMI. or BD is just used as transport here and all the conversion is performed in AVR. Then AVR sends converted signal to TV via HDMI. And then TV sends back the audio portion of that signal to AVR. I wonder why did AVR not keep that audio portion before sending it to TV and just re-routed it to Pre-out to the amplifier? Thanks for all the help!

 

[americanaudiophile]

Since CDs are only stereo you would not have to change the settings in the BD player.
BD discs have lossless audio like Dolby TrueHD which are only available when the player is connected directly to the AVR with HDMI. That's why there are two HDMI outputs on the player (one for audio only). Optical doesn't support these audio codecs so sound quality suffers on movies but not on CDs.
The audio the TV sends to the receiver via ARC is the audio that is internal to the TV (tuner or apps) and audio from sources connected directly to the TV rather than to the receiver. This has the same limitation as the optical audio output until eARC becomes available sometime late this year.