How to troubleshoot an ARC HDMI connection between TV and soundbar or receiver

if you feel like you've properly connected your television to your audio gear using hdmi but for some reason you can't get it to work you may have come to the right video hi welcome to our channel all about home electronics now from time to time and actually pretty frequently we receive questions that come in different variations of the same general thing and that is a viewer feels like they connected the hdmi cabling between their television and their audio system correctly however they just can't seem to make the sound come out of their audio system that is generated by the tv so in this video we're going to show you six or seven things to troubleshoot in hopes that we can help you fix that problem and we'll start right after this now before we get started we want to note that we're time stamping everything in the description below the video and that way if you want to watch something again you can quickly navigate to it through the time stamp now the first thing that we want to discuss is the hdmi connection itself because it's perhaps the most critical now we've come around to the back side of our example television and we're zooming into the hdmi port that we're using to connect to our audio equipment this is perhaps one of the most critical things that we want to point out in this video and perhaps one of the most frequent variations of the question we get asked people from time to time will say that their television is arc enabled but they're not sure if their audio equipment is will that work or their sound bar has an arc nomenclature on there but their tv doesn't will that work well the answer is no you have to connect the arc port from your television to the arc port on your audio system now let's take a look at our two example audio systems now some viewers are going to have a receiver and the back of their receiver is going to look similar to this other viewers won't be connecting to a receiver but rather they'll connect to a sound bar and some sound bars are going to look like this on the back now we're zooming into the hdmi arc port on the back of our example sound bar and you can see the arc nomenclature clearly imprinted underneath the hdmi port if your sound bar doesn't have the word arc imprinted under the hdmi there's a pretty good chance the sound bar is not arc enabled now that does not hold true for all sound bars there are sound bars that won't have the word arc imprinted and yet it's still an arc enabled port in that case you'd have to look it up with the owner's manual for your particular device now going back to the port on the back of our example receiver you'll see that we have an hdmi port labeled arc and it's directly in the center of your screen and as we mentioned earlier and we showed you the hdmi cable we connected to our television plugs right into that arc port if your receiver doesn't have an arc port this isn't going to work now the same holds true for a sound bar we take the television where we connected that silver tipped hdmi and just plug it right into the arc port right there if your sound bar doesn't have an arc port it isn't going to work we keep repeating this because we just want to drive that point home the first setting adjustment that we're going to take a look at are setting adjustments within the television itself now sometimes televisions will automatically enable the arc port and sometimes the television will require that you go into the menu settings and enable the arc port itself now with this particular example television we actually have to go into the tv settings to set up the arc port so we're going to take the remote control that came with the television locate the menu button and then press it and here you can see the settings that are available to look at within the menu of this particular television and we went ahead and pre-highlighted the word system now your tv is probably going to be different it's going to use different wording you'll have to familiarize yourself when you navigate through the menu but we'll select system in this case and then we'll scroll down to cec and select cec now cec does not always necessarily correspond with arc the reason that we're pointing it out in our example television is because in this television it does correspond with arc you'll see here three options disable arc only or enable what we're going to do is we're going to select enable so that'll include arc and all of the other features about cec now this video is not about cec this video is about troubleshooting an arc connection so again we're going to select enable because that will encompass arc now the next thing that we're going to look at are the actual audio settings of the television itself and here we're going to select audio now once we're within the audio sub-menu there will be two things that we're going to look to potentially adjust the first one it says tv speakers on we want to switch that to off now also you'll notice as we scroll down here a little bit lower it says digital audio out and it says bitstream but if we toggle to the right it says pcm and then back to bitstream or pcm now these are two of the more common audio signal outputs that work with most audio systems but we're pointing this out because it's possible that the capacity of your sound bar or your receiver won't process the digital signal that's being transmitted out of your television so you would be able to adjust that within the audio settings typically of your television and it is something that you're going to want to take a look at if you haven't been able to make your hdmi connection work next thing that we want to take a look at is setting up the arc capability within our audio system itself now right below this particular television is a sound bar and it does have arc capacity built into it however we don't need to actually enable that arc feature because it came from the factory defaulted to being enabled that's not to say that every sound bar out there automatically has arc enabled however in our experience we have found most of the time the arc feature in the sound bar is just automatically working straight out of the box if you're uncertain what you can do is search online for a digital copy of the owner's manual for your sound bar and look through it to see if it has steps for enabling the arc chances are it won't all right for the viewers who don't have a sound bar but they have a receiver the process is considerably different you will typically have to go into the settings of the receiver itself and enable the arc feature within the receiver now as you can imagine we're not familiar with every receiver manufactured across the world so again what you would want to do is you would want to search for a digital online copy of the owner's manual for your receiver to find the specific instructions for your receiver we'll show you a couple of ways in this particular example receiver that you have to go in to enable arc now the first thing that we want to do because the way we're going to show you is we're going to show you on the television screen we'll navigate to hdmi the arc port and this brings up the default screen that's output by our receiver now we're going to demonstrate the arc enabling feature of the receiver we're using in this video but before we do you also want to make sure the volume is turned on a lot of times we'll mute it or have the volume turn down so low even if your system was working you wouldn't notice it because the volume was off all right as a quick demonstration for how to enable arc in a receiver and of course we've mentioned your receiver is going to be different you'll want to look that up online get a digital copy of the owner's manual to find the instructions there are a couple of adjustments that we have to make with our example receiver we're going to take the remote that came with the receiver and in our case press the on screen button on the left hand side of the television it has a number of options from which to choose and in our case we'll choose setup and we're if you look at the bottom of the screen down here we're going to scroll until we find hdmi which is right there and then we'll press enter now you'll notice at the top of the screen here it says hdmi control is on we do want that turned on that's part of cec that we mentioned earlier in the video but in our case we're going to turn it on you may have found that yours was defaulted off notice it says switching audio to tv speakers right there at the bottom we're going to leave it on switching audio to external speakers again so with our example tv it does some things automatic whereas earlier in the video we showed you how to do it manual if your television doesn't do it automatic after we press enter under the hdmi control screen notice the next line down says arc and again um you might find that your arc is turned off and you would want to turn it on like that right there this pretty much wraps up how to troubleshoot an arc hdmi connection between the tv and an audio system if you have solved this problem you know please let the viewers know how you did it by posting in the comments if you have any questions please post them in the comments below the video here are a few video links we hope you might find useful if you like this video or it helped you please give it a thumbs up and subscribe free to our channel thank you for watching have a great day

Channel: All About Home Electronics.com

Views: 159,611

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Id: B9TSxAQZPN4

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2022