My apologies for my first post. Maybe meat on the bone would have better than bait on the hook. I see what you are trying to do. I don't believe that HDMI cable is premium certified. Although it states it will handle 18gbps, the drop outs say otherwise. I had the same experience before changing cables. 4K HDR discs are proving too much for it. As for ARC, I'm not sure if you have activated HDMI-CEC in all of your devices, but it is required to use ARC in your situation. The new eARC standard does not require HDMI-CEC to be activated for audio return if all of the devices in the chain support it. But, if you do want to use ARC with your system and run one HDMI cable to the TV and one to the receiver from the Panasonic, HDMI-CEC will really screw it up. When you switch the TV to the HDMI input that is connected to the Panasonic, the TV may force the receiver to the TV ARC input rather than the blu-ray audio input from the Panasonic's audio output. That would be fine, except the TV will not pass the lossless audio from the Panasonic to the receiver because only the TV potentially supports eARC. So, if you want to hook the Panasonic to the TV and the receiver using two HDMI cables, turn off HDMI-CEC and use an optical cable from the TV to the receiver for the TV's built in apps or tuner. Don't feel like you are losing out on anything. ARC cannot pass lossless audio and I don't think you will hear a difference between DD through the optical cable and DD+ from the ARC connection. I'm not sure if Sony apps even support DD+. Nothing is going to give you a better picture or sound than the Panasonic and I think that is your priority based on how you want to hook it up. Get some inexpensive, premium certified cables from Monoprice. I think that will fix the drop outs. Make sure HDR is active on all of the devices. Again, sorry about my first post. I hope you get it worked out. That is some nice gear.