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Q I own a Panasonic plasma TV and a Denon AV receiver. When I connect my sources directly to the TV, the picture looks great. But when I run my Oppo BDP-105 Blu-ray player, cable TV box, and Amazon Fire TV media player through the Denon using HDMI cables, the picture quality degrades. Is there a way I can work around the picture quality problems caused by my AVR? I want to continue using the AVR for audio switching and prefer to not have to connect sources directly to the TV. —Henry Yeboah / via e-mail

A The picture quality of an HDMI video source shouldn’t be degraded when passing through an AVR. Even so, some AVRs do have preset picture modes and video adjustments, and those may be responsible for the picture quality degradation you’re seeing.

My first recommendation: Go into the Denon’s Video setup menu and look for a setting labeled Picture Mode. Once you’ve located that, select a Bypass option if one is available. If the picture on your Panasonic TV still looks bad, another fix I’d suggest is to use your Oppo Blu-ray player as an HDMI switch.

The BDP-105’s connections include two each HDMI inputs and outputs. Simply connect your cable box and Fire TV to the player’s HDMI inputs. Next, connect one output to the TV (for video), and the second to your AVR (for audio). Once everything is hooked up, you’ll need to use the Oppo’s remote control to switch between Blu-ray, cable, and Fire TV playback, but your picture quality problems should disappear.