Last March we bought a flat panel TV, and we’ve been very pleased with the display. But we’ve been using our old speakers for the audio, and they’re a bit bulky. This isn’t merely a fashion issue–our house is pretty small and the speakers have to sit up on the fireplace mantle. Between the two speakers, they take up quite a bit of the limited space available. A few days ago, my wife and I discussed the possibility of using the speakers that are built-in to the flat panel display. This would allow us to move our old speakers into storage until we get our remodel project done.
My first stop was a search of this blog–I had written an article when we installed the flat panel, and I knew I had included a picture of the I/O panel on the back of the display. Since it’s mounted on the wall, it would be easier to find the article as opposed to trying to peek at the back of the display… Or so I thought. It turns out that I never hit the “Publish” button after I wrote the [flat panel article][]. (Well, at least that was easily fixed!)
[flat panel article]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/2006/03/08/new-tv/
Okay, so now that I have a URL for the I/O panel, here’s the picture:
RCA connectors (mostly), so I tried hooking the audio output (*not* the speaker output!) from my stereo to the display’s audio inputs. (Not the ones at the top right of the picture–those are for HDMI input. I used the red/white RCA jacks for “Input one”.) This didn’t work, so I scrounged around at home and online and finally found the [TH-50PM50U manual](http://service.us.panasonic.com/OPERMANPDF/TH42PM50-MULTI.PDF) at the [Panasonic service/support site](http://service.us.panasonic.com/OperMan/findmanual.aspx?model=TH50PM50U). This uncovered my first problem–I forgot that when I installed the display, I had disabled the speakers. A few clicks of the remote *should* have fixed this, but I still couldn’t hear anything from the display’s speakers. I had the old-school speakers wired in, and they were working so I knew there was an audio signal on the wire. In desperation I tried hooking the (amplified) speaker outputs to the display’s audio inputs, but *still* there was no audio!
All this time, I had been listening to my [iTunes][] library via the stereo, and that’s what I was expecting to hear from the flat panel’s speakers. I decided to go “back to basics” and hook the DVD player directly to the display (instead of routing everything through my stereo). This worked!
[iTunes]: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
After much, much more trial and (mostly) error, I finally think I figured out how this works–If there is no video signal coming in to the display, the audio amplifier in the flat panel seems to be disabled. This pretty much blows my plan–not only do I have to power-up the display to listen to music, I also have to pipe in a video signal *without* its accompanying audio. It can be done, but:
* It’s a hassle
* It wastes power
* The silent video is very distracting
Some good came out of all this, though. My wife and I both agreed that getting the speakers off the mantle is a Good Thing, and well worth the price of a set of [Bose speakers](http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&product=am5_virtuallyinvisible_index). Yum!
