Newbie question.

Thanks glennewdick and reubent. I will give that a try. I did not know you could route a digital signal into an analog system like that. Glad that it will work and hold me until I can research and get a DAC. For some reason I already have a set of RCA to 1/8 jack cables.

I’d had this Sony unit sitting around (100w/channel), new and unopened. This afternoon I unpacked it, plugged in my old Bose bookshelf speakers and hooked up the old Sony turntable and put on a brand new vinyl of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks....I have no intention of getting into vinyl but love that album and thought I’d dabble a little. It sounded terrible. I figured I must have done something wrong. Checked all the connections and settings. Still terrible. Really bad. Plus the volume control on this unit was stiff and sticky.

So, I got my old Toshiba tuner/receiver from 1980. (25w/channel). It was a reasonably nice unit for a kid in 1980. Was $350 then, about $1100 in today’s dollars. Well, it sounded worlds better than the Sony. Sony is now boxed up and headed back to Amazon.

Anyway, you guys are going to ruin me. I’m now going to look for a tuner, a DAC, a phono-preamp (eBay cancelled the one I ordered, sold out) and some better RCA cables. I can probably get all that for under $500 so I guess I should not complain about getting a system of this caliber with only $500 output....unless I decide I need a turntable........

I did not know you could route a digital signal into an analog system like that.

The output (on your phone) is an analog output, which is why it can be sent to the analog inputs on the ARC.

Excellent.

An additional thought regarding the above. If you are doing so, set the output from the phone to fixed (vs. variable). You will be using the preamp to control gain / volume. Your phone may automatically do this, expecting volume to be controlled by the connector to the headphones. Best to check and make sure.

Thanks. I just tried this on my old system from high school (I had no idea you could do this) and it actually works quite well. The iPhone volume had to be set close to all the way up but with it at that volume it played through the old receiver quite well.