Hi - I'm helping a neighbor with setting up some AV equipment, and we hit a wall where I can't figure out how to proceed. Hoping for some help
TL;DR version: I'm trying to find a receiver that can play audio from an HDMI input, while passing on the video component to the TV, without requiring ARC or a separate audio connection from the TV back to the receiver.
Long version:
My neighbor's existing setup was as follows:
- Cable box connected to receiver via both HDMI and optical audio
- Yamaha receiver (circa 2010) with a 5.1 speaker setup
- Receiver connected to an older Samsung TV (which only supports up to HDMI 1.3, so no ARC) via HDMI
- The speaker cables, and the HDMI cable running to the TV, are all professionally hidden in the walls, and hence hard to access
So, the cable box breaks, and the replacement he's given no longer has an optical audio output, just HDMI. I was helping him set it up, and we realized that the receiver would only pass through the HDMI signal (both audio and video components) to the TV, without decoding the audio component. Per the manual and some Google searches, the only way to get the receiver to play the audio from the cable box was to pass it to the TV via HDMI, then send it back to the receiver via optical audio cable (neither TV nor receiver supports ARC).
So an optical audio cable works, but he doesn't want to leave it exposed. We wouldn't be able to run it through his existing in-wall conduits ourselves, and hiring an electrician to do it would be expensive. I figured upgrading the receiver might be an option (maybe more expensive than an electrician, but at least he gets new gear out of it), and assumed modern receivers would be able to decode the audio from the HDMI input directly. However, the more I read up on it, it seems that's not the case.
I looked at the setup manuals for a number of sub-$500 receivers, and almost all say that they can only pass the HDMI signal on to the TV, and they need to get the audio component back either via ARC or a separate digital audio cable. I would have assumed that such a setup is common, with most equipment supporting it.
So, any suggestions? He likes Yamaha gear in particular, but the ones I looked at (RX-V385, 485, 685) all say they require ARC or an audio cable. The manual for the Pioneer VSX-834 does say an audio signal from the TV back to the receiver is
not required if the signal originates from a cable box, but I'm not sure why Pioneer would be the one exception I found, and I don't want to steer him to it without confirming, first.
