I recently bought a new audio-video receiver to add to my home-cinema setup. After some period of research I have chosen the Denon AVR-1910 to do the job. This AV-receiver is a mid-range receiver that fits all my needs and was also selected as home-cinema receiver of 2009 by whathifi.com. Although I’m very happy with this machine, it’s functionality and the sound quality I have encountered a bug/failure when the receiver is used in co-operation with a Humax digital TV tuner. This post explains the issue and it’s work-around for future reference to people who run into the same problem.

The issue

In case you own a Humax digital TV tuner with a HDMI output (like a Foxsat or a iHDR-5050c) it would be a logical decision to hook this TV tuner to your Denon AV-Receiver with a single HDMI cable. One of the advantages of HDMI is that it incorporates HD video, HD audio and control signals in one cable. So this is also what I did myself. After some time fiddeling with the input assign settings (Denon manuals are terrible, try this website) I assigned my Humax TV tuner to one of the HDMI input channels on the AV-Receiver, switched everything on and voila, all seemed fine. But this moment of joy did not last long, after changing channels between SD channels on my Humax TV tuner I noticed that the sound was lost. The only way to get the sound back is to reselect the AVR input channel or change the AVR audio settings or switch to a HD channel which forces a different surround sound settings. Although this makes the sound come back it’s not a workable situation to do after every time you change the channel.

Initially I thought I had done something wrong during the setup but after some time Googling I read about more Humax / Denon users that had similar problems and that Denon has actually recognized this bug. They are working on a solution together with Humax which will probably become available as a firmware update. Unfortunately for me and other AVR-1910 owners this type does not have a firmware update option (unlike the 2310 and higher). So unless Humax comes up with an update to fix this problem we are stuck with this bug. Fortunately there is a workaround.

The workaround

Of course this workaround is not too pretty but for me it’s workable.

1. Connect your Humax TV tuner with an additional optical lead.
2. Enter the Denon ssign input menu and associate the optical input with you Humax TV tuner
3. Enter the Denon input menu and change the setting from Auto to Digital

You will now have continues audio while changing the channels on your Humax TV tuner. The sound quality is still digital and as far as I can tell the auto lipsync feature is still working as well. The only downside is the use of an extra cable and the use of a extra input socket. Hopefully for the AVR-2310 and higher users Denon will come up with a new firmware to fix the issue. The AVR-1910 users like myself will probably be stuck with the extra optical lead unfortunately.