Multi Channel Stereo

[ROB2009]

Hello, I have a sonos connect amp connected to an arcam irdac by coax, I then go from the irdac to a Marantz NR1606 AV amp in analogue.

I can listen to music in stereo but when I switch to multi channel stereo there is no sound. I can only get multi channel stereo when using a coax from the dac to the amp.

Should I be able to listen to multi channel stereo using analogue connections between dac and amp?

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Leeps]

Hello, I have a sonos connect amp connected to an arcam irdac by coax, I then go from the irdac to a Marantz NR1606 AV amp in analogue.

I can listen to music in stereo but when I switch to multi channel stereo there is no sound. I can only get multi channel stereo when using a coax from the dac to the amp.

Should I be able to listen to multi channel stereo using analogue connections between dac and amp?

Any help greatly appreciated.

I found with my AV receiver that this...

CD player > optical out > AV receiver

...sounded better than this...

CD player > RCA analogue output > AV receiver.

...despite the fact that the CD player's internal DAC would be considered "better". I put it down to the inferior analogue stages in my AVR. So if I was trying to achieve what you are with my system, I'd skip the separate DAC altogether and use the AV receiver's DAC.

It could be that your AV receiver does any multi-channel decoding in the digital domain, but the analogue stages bypass that altogether. Although I'm really guessing there. I'm pretty sure that I used Pioneer's "Extended Stereo" (multi-channel output of a stereo input) with my AV receiver's analogue inputs when I used it that way, but it's been a while since I went the optical route.