Ever wonder why there's a special HDMI 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 soundbar. 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. 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 to 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 soundbar
instead of a full-fledged home theater system with a receiver, you'd need some kind of
cable to connect your TV to the soundbar, 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 soundbar route, as the newest version,
called eARC, can carry 32 channels of uncompressed audio, meaning it'll work with fancy object-based
round-sound schemes like Dolby Atmos and DTSX, technologies which TOSLink and RCA don't
support. And of course, if you've got one of those soundbars that can pass through HDMI video
signals from multiple external devices, you can just connect everything to the soundbar,
have a single HDMI cable running from the soundbar to your TV, and take advantage of
HDMI ARC just as you would if you had used a traditional AP receiver.
But despite the obvious benefits of HDMI ARC and eARC, there are some situations where
you might actually not want to use it. 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 and do 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.
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 TossLink or RCA instead of using ARC
at all. 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.
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