HDMI ARC (There's Something Nobody Has Been Telling You...)

HDMI arc you've probably seen it on your soundbar annual receiver even your TV now what does it mean and what does it do hi my name is Jonah with the home theater DIY today we're gonna go over HDMI art how it works what it does what the pros and cons are and should you be using it it's mainly used with sound bars and receivers so if you have your video devices plugged into your receiver or sound bar this can be routing that video signal to the TV or projector but let's say you have a smart TV and you're playing Netflix or Hulu on that TV well without HDMI art there's no way for that audio to get back to the sound bar receiver so what HDMI art does is its routing that audio signal back through the same HDMI cable in the reverse direction and that's how the audio gets from the TV to the sound bar or receiver so before HDMI Arc you had to run a digital optical digital coax or RCA cables from the TV or projector to the soundbar receiver and that's how you would get the audio signal from one video device to the audio device but because of HDMI Arc you don't have to do that anymore all the audio and video sent through a single cable so that's really nice and convenient for a lot of setups nowadays so almost any HDMI cable is going to work with HDMI Arc as long as the cable is not like 20 years old you should be perfectly fine something to note here you need to make sure hdmi cec is enabled on your TV or projector sometimes hdmi cec isn't enabled by default so go to your your video settings look for hdmi cec or consumer electronics control and make sure that option is enabled so let's talk about some of the cons of audio delivery with HDMI Arc one of the major limitations with HDMI Arc is that it doesn't support Dobey at most or DTS X sound environments so if you have a 7.1.2 sound system that audio signal isn't going to route back properly it's gonna downgrade it to a compressed 5.1 signal and if you're looking for the highest quality environment it's really not going to be the best choice for you so to get around this and use the highest quality audio format you're going to have to connect all your devices to the sound bar or receiver so if you have a fire TV Apple TV Roku if you're streaming from those that device should connect directly to the sound bar or receiver and that way you're not losing those high-quality audio formats now something to note here the audio that's coming from the TV no matter what you do is not going to be a full seven point one or nine point one surround sound audio it's going to be compressed 5.1 because it's running over HDMI Arc and there's just no way to get around that right now so if you want the highest quality audio possible you'll need to make sure everything's connected to that sound bar or receiver end of story there there's no way around it right now so for a quick demonstration let's go look at the back of the sound bar and a receiver and look at the HDMI Arc ports on those and let's also go on a TV and make sure we have the HDMI CEC option enabled on a receiver it's going to be the HDMI out port sometimes labeled monitor but it should show arc right there with a sound bar it's going to be the only HDMI out port on the sound bar also going to be labeled Ark and with the TV this will vary from model to model sometimes it's the first port sometimes it's a second or third so just make sure it says Ark next to the port you're plugging into if your setup includes a high quality sound bar such as I can Nakamichi shockwave Pro go check out this video up here right there it's how to connect a sound bar to a TV I'll go over all the different options available whether you're using HDMI Arc digital optical digital coax RCA is auxilary and bluetooth so go check that out for all the pros and cons on each of those methods and that's all we have for you today we hope you enjoyed the video if you have any questions leave those down in the comments below if you liked the video please click like and subscribe to the channel we have more stuff coming to you soon we'll see you next time see ya

Channel: Jonah Matthes

Views: 992,145

Keywords: HDMI ARC, HDMI Audio Return Channel, ARC, Audio Return Channel

Id: kndf2JCnHY0

Length: 3min 58sec (238 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020