Discussion
Is there any benefit in having an eARC compatible receiver, if all your devices are connected to the receiver via HDMI? (i.e. using the receiver as the hub)
I assume you only get the benefit of eARC if you use the TV as the hub so enhanced audio formats can flow through the TV to the receiver, right?
I assume you only get the benefit of eARC if you use the TV as the hub so enhanced audio formats can flow through the TV to the receiver, right?
The benefit of eARC/ARC comes when the TV is a later spec than the AV receiver, and you're making use of features such as the higher refresh rate for gaming or Dolby Vision from a Fire TV stick / Roku / nVidia Shield.
Where your AV receiver supports all of that then ARC or eARC is pretty much redundant. However, say you connect your console via the AV receiver, but then find that the latency is much worse than if connected to the TV directly; now you have a reason for ARC/eARC.
When eARC was announced then one of the big advances over standard ARC was to be the ability to handle HD audio i the lossless formats: Dolby True HD and DTS-HD MA. This has kind of fallen flat on its face though. In order to take advantage of the TV passing HD audio from its HDMI inputs through to its eARC output then the AV receiver at the other end also needs to be eARC compatible. But when you get a receiver that is, then it's likely to be able to handle DolbyVision and HDR10/10+ anyway, which is the reason why you were trying to pipe the signal via the TV in the first place!
There isn't much in external sources that goes beyond Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus. Optical will handle DD but not DD+. The main source is BD and UHD BD discs. A smaller number would be those who have ripped their disc collections to a network storage drive (NAS) and are using PLEX or KODI or something similar for playback. In the world of gaming the Playstation consoles use DTS, and some TVs will pass (lossy) DTS in 5.1 via ARC or lossless DTS HD via eARC, but it's by no means universal. For example, current generation LG TVs don't pass any DTS at all. Other brands pass only 2-channel DTS.
Where your AV receiver supports all of that then ARC or eARC is pretty much redundant. However, say you connect your console via the AV receiver, but then find that the latency is much worse than if connected to the TV directly; now you have a reason for ARC/eARC.
When eARC was announced then one of the big advances over standard ARC was to be the ability to handle HD audio i the lossless formats: Dolby True HD and DTS-HD MA. This has kind of fallen flat on its face though. In order to take advantage of the TV passing HD audio from its HDMI inputs through to its eARC output then the AV receiver at the other end also needs to be eARC compatible. But when you get a receiver that is, then it's likely to be able to handle DolbyVision and HDR10/10+ anyway, which is the reason why you were trying to pipe the signal via the TV in the first place!
There isn't much in external sources that goes beyond Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus. Optical will handle DD but not DD+. The main source is BD and UHD BD discs. A smaller number would be those who have ripped their disc collections to a network storage drive (NAS) and are using PLEX or KODI or something similar for playback. In the world of gaming the Playstation consoles use DTS, and some TVs will pass (lossy) DTS in 5.1 via ARC or lossless DTS HD via eARC, but it's by no means universal. For example, current generation LG TVs don't pass any DTS at all. Other brands pass only 2-channel DTS.
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