Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HDMI’s Sneakily Good Feature”.
Ever wonder why there’s a special HMI port on the back of your TV that says Arc next to it, even though it looks exactly the same as the other HDMI ports Arc stands for audio return Channel and it’s sneakily one of the hdmi’s best features with a Few caveats, to put it simply Arc, sends an audio signal back down the HDMI cable to an AV receiver or a set of speakers such as a sound bar. You just need to make sure both devices support Arc. It’S relevant when you’re using external speakers. Instead of the ones built into your TV – and there are lots of folks with this kind of setup who aren’t necessarily home theater or Tech enthusiasts, built-in TV speakers are often lacking in sound quality partially because they have to be made rather small that fit inside the Thin thin TVs, we’re used to today and partly because manufacturers are typically much more concerned with picture quality than they are with sound quality. Meaning external speakers are extremely popular without HDMI ARC. You’D have to use at least one additional cable to send sound from your TV to your external speakers whenever the content you’re watching originates from the TV itself. So we’re talking about situations where you’re watching over-the-air Channels with an antenna or using built-in Smart TV apps for streaming content. Of course, if you’ve connected any external sources like streaming devices, cable boxes, Blu-ray players or game consoles directly to the TV and you’re just using a sound bar instead of a full-fledged home theater system with a receiver, you’d need some kind of cable to connect. Your TV to the sound bar, regardless whether it’s an HDMI, cable or a toslink, cable or just some old-school, red and white RCA cables, but HDMI ARC is still useful if you’re going the sound bar route as the newest version called e-arc can carry 32 channels of Uncompressed, audio meaning it’ll work with fancy object-based round sound schemes like Dolby, Atmos and dtsx Technology, switch, toslink and RCA, don’t support and, of course, if you’ve got one of those sound bars that can pass through HDMI video signals from multiple external devices.
You can just connect everything to the sound bar: have a single HDMI, cable running from the sound bar to your TV and take advantage of HD my arc, just as you would. If you have used a traditional AP receiver. But despite the obvious benefits of HDMI ARC and e-arc, there are some situations where you might actually not want to use it and we’ll tell you what those are right after we thank Best Buy, get ready to save on your next tech upgrade with Best Buy’s back To school sale, maybe it’s time to replace that old, laptop you’ve been carrying around or get a second monitor to increase your productivity. Your Excel spreadsheets will thank you check out Best Buy’s back to school sale and grab some new gear at the link.
Below probably the biggest issue with Arc is that it’s usually coupled with a feature called consumer electronics, control or CEC. In theory, CEC is a good idea. It’S the feature that allows you to control the volume on your receiver or Soundbar with one remote causes the audio system to switch off. Whenever you turn off the TV and switches the input automatically when you fire up an attached device like a game console, I personally hate having multiple remotes and I love these quality of life improvements.
But the problem is that all these different Gadget manufacturers can undo Implement. Cec in different ways, meaning that devices don’t necessarily talk to each other properly, resulting in weird behaviors, the power switching off when you don’t want it to and even audio coming out of the wrong speakers. Although CEC and HDMI ARC are technically separate features, many TV manufacturers design their software to where you cannot turn off one feature without also turning off the other leading to CEC glitches becoming a common gripe for folks who use HDMI ARC in their setups. This can be especially infuriating if you have a receiver connected to a cable box, as cable boxes tend to be cheaply designed and ripe for CEC hiccups, but there are a couple of ways to avoid these glitches.
If you have a simple setup that only handles stereo, sound or conventional 5.1 Channel surround, you might consider using additional cables like toslink or RCA instead of using Arc at all. And if you really want to be a hacker, you can keep Arc and disable CEC by covering up pin 13 on the HDMI cable. But please don’t sue us if something goes awry thanks for watching guys. If you like, this, video hit like hit, subscribe and hit us up in the comment section with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future, .