I have a pioneer 704 hooked up through a harmon kardon receiver. I can play newer laserdiscs just fine and everything. Picture is great and sound is great. I can not play older discs, like ones from the 80s. Picture is fine but there is no sound. I tried to play Monster High and a 16 Candles and the picture is great, I have no sound. I have it hooked up right because the newer discs have awesome sound. Any idea on what is up here?

Thanks

would almost sound like it only play digital audio tracks, have you tried playing analog tracks on the newer discs? =)

Not yet

Do you have it hooked up only via digital TOSLiNK or Coax? If so, you'll have to use the RCA outs to access the analog tracks.

I was going to say this, but I was worried I would be insulting mikeystoyz' intelligence

I don't think it's an insult to intelligence, because I've done that before - hooked up a player via digital and forgot the analog connection's. It's just a slip up.

I know of another possibility. On my Pio Elite VSX-27TX you have to assign the digital inputs to each switchable source. The receiver then flips back and forth (when you have it in "auto detect") between analog inputs and digital inputs when it detects sound or presence on either. Sometimes it doesn't flip to analog when playing an analog only LD. I have to hit "signal select" on my remote to manually select "analog" in order to get analog sound from LDs.

Also annoying when I want to play an Anime LD with the Japanese track on the analog, but it defaults to digital!

My Denon receiver is like that - any digital or analog audio input can be assigned to any video input, so for example, my TheaterVision's AC-3 and LX-900's AC-3 outputs go to a passive audio/video switcher along with their analog outputs - I use the composite video in/out to send the switched AC-3 signal to my Sony Demodulator, when then gets fed into Optical Input #3 of the Denon. The optical outputs from my two LX-900's go to Optical 1 and 4 respectively. The TheaterVisions coax digital out goes to coax 1 on the Denon. The analog outputs from all 3 players go through the switch box and into a Shure HTS-5300 Acra-Vector surround decoder which then gets fed into a DTS encoder whose output goes to Optical 2 input on the Denon. If I want to listen to analog without the Shure decoder, its tape monitor out goes into a Sony DAT deck for AD conversion and the optical out gets fed into input 1 of the Sony demodulator, which, of course, is connected to input 3 of the Denon.

So, to watch discs on different players I have to reassign audio inputs on the fly and make sure the switch box is set right. I printed stickers for everything to keep it clear and since each LaserDisc player requires different settings on the television, I printed stickers with each players settings and pasted them to the back of the remotes.

It sounds much more complex than it really is, but it works - I do sometimes get mixed up with switching.

BTW, I was glad to discover that any passive switcher will allow multiple AC-3 RF signals to be connected to a single demodulator.

I have both digital and analog cables hooked up. I will try to see if I can only choose analog. First thing I can do is undo the digital to see if that is the issue. I am thinking you guys are right. Now I am going to have to find the remote and see if I can turn the digital off, lol. Anyway, thanks for the help! I will let you know how it goes later.

Yeah, my HK receiver will always chose digital, even if there is no sound coming from it, if the auto polling option is on. This makes the feature pretty useless for LD, IMO, since the TOSLINK will always be lit any time an LD player is powered on, even with analog-only discs.

My Denon has the auto digital function too, but also let's you manually select which input to use, so with two button pushes, the analog audio in for that source is selected.

that sounds like it, my pioneer had analog, digital and auto.
it would only give digital for the auto setting, so i had to select the analog, but mine had a button on the front.
didn't always have to use the remote.

My Denon 3808 offers all the remote functions on the front panel too, plus the cursor and keys like the remote. I just wish it gave access to all the Faroudja chips functions - it has an excellent 2D comb filter and DCDI scailing to 1080P but without the diagonal cross-color removal processing or the chroma bandwidth expansion and True Life functions. I hate knowing those functions are there with no way to access them. And Denon even did several upgrades via the net link but none dealt with the Faroudja processing.

It was the remote, was set to Coax, I used it and set it to analog - Works perfect.

My Yamaha receiver has an auto-detect function like this. When playing an analog-only disc on the 704, I have had it happen that it starts off on "analog" (I presume because the player is outputting a "mute" signal over SPDIF), & then partway through the disc, it switches to digital, leaving me with a suddenly silent disc!

Mine is all remote and there are a whole lot of settings. Something like at least 40 possibilities with all the different dts, analog, digital and other settings.

As I do have MUSE discs but no dts LDs, I wound up trunking all my LD audio options (from two players) through a Pioneer SP-D07 (equivalent to the Elite SP-99D). I just set the options manually now.