Sony RDR-VX500 garbled audio on non 5.1 DVD playback

[NormalJoe]

I recently purchased this unit primarily to record from VHS->DVD. Since it was a new model DVD player I decided to substitute it for my old one, however I noticed that only DVDs with Dolby Digital 5.1 would play back, meaning all of the top menu audio and special dvd features would sound garbled but the movie would play back just fine.

I discovered that if I changed the Digial Out format on the unit to D-PCM instead of Dolby Digital the problem would go away. However, the normal movie playback wouldn't be 5.1 just 2.1 which is really lame.

So I was wondering if there's a solution to this out there, other than returning the unit and using my 6 year old DVD player that didn't have this particular problem. Is there some sort of device that takes a 2.1 output and converts it to 5.1? This seemed to be what my old player was doing automatically.

Thanks

[RFBurns]

Most DVD extras and menu audio is 2.1 audio, which your DTS reciever should automatically re-adjust itself for that. I would check the reciever and its settings, maybe check the extra sound fields settings...example would be "theatre" or "movie", they are labled differently from one brand of reciever to another.

As far as I know, there are no service bullitens regarding distorted 2.1 audio playback for that machine. Before responding to your post, I checked the Sony ESI database to see if there were any reports of the symptom you are experiencing. None to be found. So it should not require any updating of the firmware. But it could be a fresh new symptom that no one has discovered..until now.

I will keep checking the database and post any updates as necessary here.