Solved! Blu-Ray signal into receiver can't be found by TV through ARC?

[luthierwnc]

Hi All, Thanks in advance for your interest.

I have an older Sony Blu-Ray play that has always worked well except for one thing. When I upgraded the media room to 5.1, the signal doesn't make it to the TV through the receiver. For the first year I had a Denon AVR-X1300W receiver with a couple iffy HDMI ports but it wouldn't work on any of the good ones either through the ARC port. I just plugged the Blu-Ray into one of the TV's other HDMI ports and the sound came back through the ARC fine.

I just moved that Denon to my home office and got an older AVR-E400 for the TV room and the same thing happened. And all of the HDMI inputs are fine on that unit. All the other components work great. For grins I put a series HDMI splitter/booster on the Blu-Ray output and that had no effect.

I could replace the unit inexpensively but don't need to because doing the end-run direct to the TV works fine. My question is whether this is a common issue among DVD players OR if there is something that everyone else knows but me about hooking these things up correctly. Tangential question: is it possible my unit predates ARC and the signal isn't in a format that translates in the process?

It's got me stumped but I have a workaround. If you've seen this before, I hope you'll share your experience. Thanks, sh

 

[americanaudiophile]

ARC (audio return channel) is to get audio from the TV to the receiver using the same HDMI cable that sends video from the receiver to the TV.
The receiver HDMI output connects to the HDMI-ARC on the TV. This sends audio from the TV tuner and smart apps to the receiver without an optical audio cable.
Your external sources connect to the receiver directly. The receiver takes care of the audio so there is no reason to send the sound to the TV if the sources are connected directly to the receiver..
Many receivers are designed to send AV over HDMI to the TV when in standby but not usually when the receiver is turned on. You don't want the TV speakers disturbing the surround sound effect.
When you connected the BD player to the TV and used ARC that worked but doesn't support lossless audio codecs like Dolby TrueHD so the sound quality would not be as good. Other sources that don't have lossless audio could be connected to the TV without loss of sound quality.
The next version of HDMI supports lossless audio over HDMI-ARC but it's not out yet. Maybe by years end.

 

[luthierwnc]

Thanks americanaudiophile, The stumper is that every other device (cable, Apple TV, network) I put into the receiver goes to and from the ARC port perfectly. But the Blu-Ray player can't/won't -- not on any HDMI input on two different receivers. The TV gropes around for a bit and then shows a source error. But when it's plugged directly into the TV, it works. On the old receiver the sound came back to the receiver via the ARC port. I haven't found the secret to do that with the new receiver but a Toslink cable works just as well.

I was mostly wondering if the player is so old that it can't make the outgoing ARC handshake. It's a stretch but the search is widening, sh