We installed Sony BDP-S300 to a 47” 1080p HDTV set from LG (47LC7DF) and to a Sony STR-DG510 5.1 receiver.

As we mentioned briefly, this unit sends audio signal thru the HDMI connector, which is really convenient if you receiver has an embedded video switcher, as you will need just one cable for connecting the player to your home theater system. This video switcher feature, present on several home theater receivers, allows you to simultaneously switch your audio and video by the press of a button. For example, when you press “DVD” on the receiver, it will automatically play the audio being sent by your DVD player (in our case, the Blu-Ray player) and send the DVD video (Blu-Ray video, in our case) signal to your TV, at the same time. By selecting “Video 2”, for instance, it will switch both audio and video to whatever equipment is connected to that input (your cable decoder, for example). On receivers without this feature you can only select the audio input, not the video, so you have to switch the audio input on the receiver and the video input on your TV.

If you don’t have a receiver with a video switcher then you will need an extra audio cable, since you will need to connect the player to your TV using a HDMI cable and then use an audio cable to connect the player to the receiver, preferably an optical SPDIF cable (a.k.a. Toslink cable), if your receiver has an optical SPDIF input available. Otherwise you will need to use a coaxial SPDIF cable (a.k.a. RCA mono cable). You will also to select the correct video input on your TV and the correct audio input on your receiver.

Our problem here, however, wasn’t with the player but with our receiver. Even though Sony STR-DG510 has a video switcher, it is not capable of extracting audio from the HDMI inputs (which is a shame, by the way), so the audio was routed to the TV instead of being played on the receiver. Since our TV was with its audio outputs disabled – as it is the normal procedure if you have a home theater receiver – we couldn’t hear anything BDP-S300 was playing. The solution was to connect a digital audio cable from the player to the receiver – one extra cable and one extra cost. One again, this was a limitation of our receiver and had nothing to do with the player itself.

As we mentioned, this unit doesn’t come with the cables you’ll need. If your receiver has an embedded video switcher you will need to buy two HDMI cables, one to connect your player to your receiver and another to connect your receiver to your TV – plus a digital audio cable (optical or coaxial SPDIF, depending on what you have available on your receiver) if your receiver, like ours, is incapable of extracting audio from the HDMI connector. If it doesn’t have a video switcher, then you will need to buy one HDMI cable to connect your player to your TV and one audio cable (optical or coaxial SPDIF, depending on what you have available on your receiver) to connect your player to your receiver.

From what we’ve been seen on the market, the most common HDMI cable lengths are 3 feet, 6 feet and 12 feet. We tried them all and three feet proved to be too short to connect the player to the TV, but if you are using a receiver with an embedded video switcher and you will place the player on top of it, this length is adequate. To connect your player or receiver to your TV you will need a 6-feet cable if the player or receiver is right below or right above your TV. If they are more distant than that, then you need to buy a 12-feet cable.

Once again, buy these cables on-line at stores like Newegg.com: it makes no sense paying USD 40 or more on a HDMI cable when they cost less than half of this on-line.

After the physical installation it is time to turn on the player for the first time. This player delays a lot to come to life for the first time – 90 seconds –, as it is advertised on a flyer that comes with the product. After that the player displays a quick configuration menu, where you need to select the language, display resolution and TV aspect ratio. After that your player is ready to be used.

Here we found a problem, we configured the output resolution as “auto” and the player recognized our TV as a 720p device. So we needed to change this manually. So after this initial setup, press the “Video Format” button on the remote control to double check if the player is configured with your TV maximum resolution.

After this initial setup we had to correct the audio configuration of the player. Since the player isn’t able to guess what kind of home theater you have, its default configuration disables Dolby Digital and DTS signals. Since our receiver has Dolby Digital, DTS and Dolby Pro Logic (which simulates 5.1 output when the original audio signal has only two channels) decoders, we configured Dolby Digital as “Dolby Digital” (instead of “Downmix PCM”), DTS as “DTS” (instead of “Downmix PCM”) and “DTS Downmix” as “Lt/Rt”, which enables Dolby Pro Logic (instead of “Stereo”). This configuration is accessible by pressing “System Menu” on the remote and then navigating to Setup, Audio Setup.

After this configuration we were ready to watch movies using all the power from Sony BDP-S300.