It’s more than just sound being on the right ports, as there’s a handshake that has to go along with the connection: this sorts out how sound is synchronised, plus the HDMI CEC control information.Įven if you buy an HDMI 2.1 splitter and send one cable into the back of the Sonos Arc, you won’t get any sound out of it at all. So, sound goes from a device (or app) into the TV, which then outputs the sounds on the right pins to the external device connected via eARC or ARC. HDMI eARC (and ARC before it) output sound on different pins in the HDMI cable than with a regular HDMI port. If you are lucky enough to have HDMI eARC (the port on the back will be labelled as such), then the full high-quality signal can be passed through to the Sonos Arc.Ĭan’t you connect a device directly to the Sonos Arc through an HDMI splitter? Effectively, unless you’ve bought a TV in the last 18 months or so, it’s unlikely that you’ll have HDMI eARC, which means you can’t run the highest-quality audio into the Sonos Arc. Which TVs have HDMI eARC?Īlthough HDMI eARC can technically be implemented on HDMI 2.0b ports, the reality is it’s only TVs with HDMI 2.1 ports that support eARC. So, an HDMI ARC on a TV can be plugged into the HDMI eARC of the Sonos Arc. HDMI eARC is backwards compatible with HDMI ARC, and can switch to the lower bandwidth option for compatibility with older devices. This is where HDMI eARC comes in, with an increased bandwidth of 37Mbps, and improved lip-sync. The problem is that high-quality uncompressed audio, such as Dolby TrueHD, needs more bandwidth and won’t run over HDMI ARC. In addition to boosting bandwidth for higher-quality audio, HDMI ARC also supports HDMI CEC, which means your TV’s volume controls can adjust sound on the external device, and there’s built-in lip-sync correction, too, although this often needs manual adjustments to make it work properly. Designed as an upgrade to Optical S/PDIF, HDMI ARC has a maximum audio bandwidth of 1Mbps (S/PDIF is limited to around 384Kbps). The HDMI Audio Return Channel (ARC) was designed to let audio flow in the opposite direction to a soundbar or home cinema amp. Yet, as good as this move is, there’s potentially a problem for many people: the Sonos Arc only has a single eARC HDMI input, so what does this mean if you don’t have the same type of port on your TV? The answer depends on the type of TV you have, how old it is and the types of ports you have available.
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