While hooking it up with a optical cable is easy and digital, if you plug the cable to your TV's audio optical output , you will get you sound no matter what input you're using to feed your tv such as DVD satellite or cable, the problem lies in that almost all TVs audio optical output is only in stereo so you won't feed 5.1 or above to your sound bar . If your TV has hdmi audio out, that's preferred as you will feed whatever true audio is fed to your TV from whatever source. Newer Samsung TV will connect to the sound bar via Bluetooth!