Features, settings & updates

[bulnomali]

Added an AV receiver last night to my parents' living room to upgrade from the 1990s stereo receiver they'd been using, speakers are currently in a 5.0 arrangement (no sub, 12" woofers at all 4 corners instead, currently). Went through the receiver's speaker setup, and all 5 channels are making good sound both from internal test and from running optical media thru a Blu Ray player connected via HDMI, outputting 6-channel PCM (used the test/setup mode from the 5.1 BD of Pink Floyd's Animals that came out last year, and played some of the album).

I switch over to the Roku, and all I get is stereo. I've tried 5.1-movies and music both through Plex, all in PCM. Stereo only. I've tried 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus-encoded movies through Netflix. Stereo only. I've made sure in all cases that I had selected the 5.1 stream.

Nothing from the stick hits the rear or center channels. The receiver was set to Direct mode at all times during this, it would play surround if it was receiving any. I did try cycling through all listening modes, and only the fake-surround DSP modes put any sound into the rears and center. I set every auto-passthru or passthru-preferred option I could find in settings for the stick or the apps. No change.

Is this a limitation of the device, or is something broken?

[agoraphone]

Make sure you have "Listening mode" set to off instead of "Leveling" or "Night mode". This option is not available in the audio settings menu (c'mon Roku!), but is instead found by pressing the "*" button during playback. Turning on one of these listening modes seems to reduce all surround signals to stereo.