I have not yet mastered all the tricky processing settings on the A6A, so a question for the owners who have much more experience with this product line: what setting(s) on the remote control should I use to see on the front panel exactly what type of source material (e.g. 2-channel analog stereo, PCM stereo, Dolby 5.1, Dolby Atmos, DTS, etc.) is being received and processed at the moment, even if this is displayed briefly? When I experiment with the settings, I only see what processing mode is being selected, not what the source material actually is.
Yesterday, I again tried to determine what causes the long gaps (typically, about 15 seconds) in the sound from the TV over HDMI ARC. Findings:
1. When playing an OTA broadcast, switching between adjacent channels produces only a shorter ~2-second gap; I believe that is what
@Replicant 7 also reported. That is inconvenient when browsing channels, but bearable, I guess.
2. Within the same OTA channel, if there is a scene change (such as a switch from a sports event to an interview of an athlete or to commentators), there is a long silent gap. The same happens during a commercial break in which some successive commercials have surround sound and some do not.
3. When switching from the OTA broadcast to a streaming app and starting to play some contents, there is a long gap. The same happens during an automatic switch to the next episode in a series and sometimes during the transition from the introductory part (i.e. when the Skip button is displayed) to the immediately following new episode.
Changing the Sound > Ultra Low Jitter PLL Mode setting for the TV input to Off from the default 1 and back has no noticeable effect. (Higher settings [2, 3] would make things worse; see p. 260 of the User Guide.)
While I do not know the design details of this AVR design, I suspect that these gaps have to do with the PLL on the HDMI ARC input taking a long time to converge when the source material changes between PCM stereo and Dolby 5.1, with the firmware blocking the audio output.
Update 3/30:
I tried to find additional settings that could be experimented with to get to the root cause of this long audio delay. I came across HDMI Control and ARC. Both are enabled by default, so that is how I am able to play audio and control the volume from my TV. However, the help screen has a note saying "You need to perform the HDMI Control link setup after connecting HDMI Control-compatible devices" (the same statement is on pp. 271 and 317 of the User Guide). So what exactly is this "HDMI Control link setup"? There is no explanation whatsoever. I could not find any other setting in the menu structure for the "link setup." Any idea what this is about and how exactly to perform it?
