Right now, eARC is going to be most useful for folks who connect all of their content devices to their TV’s HDMI inputs, instead of the inputs on a soundbar or AV receiver. That’s why we now have enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC), which has plenty of capacity and can handle lossless hi-res audio up to 24-bit/192kHz, which should satisfy even the most demanding audiophile. There’s also the possibility that streaming services will decide to offer lossless audio as an upgrade in the future.Īs you might have already guessed, Dolby TrueHD requires more bandwidth than Dolby Digital Plus, and the HDMI ARC specification was never designed to handle it. If you’re only streaming Dolby Atmos (say from Netflix or Apple TV+), this is no big deal because that’s the same kind of Atmos that these services use.īut physical media, like Blu-ray discs or game discs for consoles, along with certain downloaded music files, use a higher quality version of Dolby Atmos thanks to the lossless, hi-res capabilities of Dolby TrueHD. HDMI ARC was a big improvement over optical audio connections, but the technology suffers from one limitation that audio purists have always bemoaned: It has the bandwidth to support Dolby Atmos, but only the lossy version of this format, which uses Dolby Digital Plus. eARC: Making ARC even better Dan Baker/Digital Trends With HDMI ARC, you can ditch your soundbar or receiver’s remotes - as soon as you start watching content that originates from your TV, your connected soundbar or receiver will automatically switch to the correct input. You may also have to enable or disable your TV’s built-in speakers each time you switch. Normally, when using an optical connection from a TV to a receiver or soundbar, you need to manually switch to the optical input when you want to hear your TV’s sound, and then switch back to the HDMI inputs on the receiver or soundbar when you want to go back to watching an external source of content. Always pay close attention to a product’s specifications to know what it can or can’t do. For instance, some TVs will play Dolby Atmos using their built-in speakers, but they can’t pass along that same Dolby Atmos content via their HDMI ARC connection (known as Dolby Atmos passthrough). There is a caveat here: Even though HDMI ARC can transmit higher-bandwidth formats like Dolby Atmos, your TV still has to support these formats. HDMI ARC, with its larger data capacity, can transmit these formats too, so if you’re using your TV to stream a Dolby Atmos title from Disney+, you’ll be able to send that signal to your compatible AV receiver or soundbar. However, throw a newer surround sound format at it, like Dolby Atmos or DTS:X, and it chokes. Optical cables are great for sending Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound from device to device. HDMI ARC brings that simplicity back by letting you once again use a single cable for all your needs. That not only destroyed the simplicity of a single-cable connection, but it also meant you needed to press some additional buttons to get things working every time you switched to using your TV as the sound source. Before the advent of HDMI ARC, if you wanted to hear these sources on your receiver’s speakers instead of the ones built into your TV, you needed to run a second cable (typically an optical cable) from your TV back to your receiver. Some TVs have their own streaming apps or TV tuners. So far, so good.īut not every source of video you might want to watch comes from an external device. If you own an AV receiver, and you plug in your Blu-ray players, game consoles, or streaming device into it, the receiver will play the audio portion through your home theater speakers and send the video portion along to your TV. As the name suggests, Audio Return Channel - which gives us the “ARC” in HDMI ARC/eARC - adds the ability for a TV to send audio backward along an HDMI cable to its source device.
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