Trend 2: Streaming is displacing discs<\/h2>\n
At the same time, there is another trend that has emerged especially in recent years: external video sources (such as a Blu-ray player or digicorder) are being used less and less.\u00a0Instead, the apps from\u00a0streaming services<\/strong>\u00a0(such as Netflix) that are on the TV itself became extremely popular.\u00a0In short, television itself became the source of content – and therefore also of the accompanying sound.\u00a0Nowadays, if there is an external device hanging on a television screen, it is a console.<\/p>\n Recently, a third trend was added: the breakthrough of surround sound with height channels.\u00a0Think of\u00a0DTS: X<\/strong>\u00a0and Auro3D, but especially\u00a0Dolby Atmos<\/strong>.\u00a0This is by far the most popular surround codec of the latest generation, both for physical carriers and for streaming services.\u00a0Initially, Atmos seemed like something for the avid home theater builder and not relevant for people who ‘only’ bought a soundbar.\u00a0However, technology is not standing still, making an increasingly accurate reproduction of surround (including height channels) by a soundbar possible.\u00a0In 2020 such a device can still not match a good set-up with discrete speakers.\u00a0But it cannot be denied that placing eleven speakers in a room and connecting to an AV receiver takes a lot more effort than installing and connecting a soundbar.\u00a0And then we will not mention the price difference: a top-level soundbar with Atmos costs approximately 1,000 to 1,500 euros, with the occasional outlier such as the 2.Sennheiser Ambeo Bar<\/strong>\u00a0.\u00a0For a setup with receiver and speakers that offers 5.1.4, you will quickly lose 4,000 – 5,000 euros.\u00a0Or much more.\u00a0Few would like to spend 2.5 to four times more for better quality, but less convenience.<\/p>\n So HDMI-ARC has proven to be very useful, but for several reasons the standard has run into its limitations.\u00a0Time for an update: eARC.\u00a0It is only one letter more, but it is a serious evolution.\u00a0Make no mistake, apparently ARC and eARC do about the same thing, but technically eARC is completely different.\u00a0Where ARC the\u00a0CEC channel used for the communication between TV and audio device, eARC uses the data channel that was provided to send a network connection over an HDMI cable.\u00a0That Ethernet-over-HDMI channel has been around for a long time, but is hardly used in practice.\u00a0The step to this channel is significant, because HDMI-CEC often proved to perform fickle.\u00a0This is not so bad for reporting a volume change (and with eARC that will therefore continue to be done via CEC).\u00a0More importantly, eARC must prevent errors during a so-called discovery moment (in which the TV and audio device tell each other what they can do).\u00a0Because that is very problematic and can cause silences if, for example, you click on a certain piece of content with a surround encoding in a streaming service app.<\/p>\n A plus of eARC is therefore that fewer problems may occur with the interplay between audio device and television.\u00a0In addition, this data channel is also used to control lip sync.\u00a0So eARC audio devices should play sound in perfect sync with the image.<\/p>\n The biggest advantage everyone points out is that the eARC connection has more bandwidth than HDMI-ARC.\u00a0The latter was limited to maximally compressed 5.1 streams, such as Dolby Digital +.\u00a0eARC, however, broadens the old limitation from 1 Mbit \/ s to 37 Mbit \/ s.\u00a0EARC can therefore carry uncompromised surround sound, such as the Dolby Atmos variant used with an Ultra HD Blu-ray movie.<\/p>\n A real breakthrough?\u00a0Yes, but at the same time it doesn’t really matter.\u00a0The Netflix trend means that the added value of eARC is relative in terms of bandwidth.\u00a0After all, an HDMI-ARC connection is sufficient to transmit surround sound from streaming services, even when it comes to Dolby Atmos.\u00a0After all, Netflix and co use\u00a0Dolby Atmos<\/strong>\u00a0height channels embedded on Dolby Digital Plus, which takes up less bandwidth than the Atmos channels embedded on Dolby TrueHD (as you will find with Ultra HD Blu-ray movies).\u00a0Is that going to change?\u00a0Given that in a soundbar scenario you get relatively little in terms of quality from the step from DD + to TrueHD and that that step would consume much more internet bandwidth, we do not think that streaming services will do this quickly.<\/p>\n With eARC, the audio is sent in a different way than ARC.\u00a0That means that those two techniques are not compatible.\u00a0Still, new eARC sound bars will probably work if you connect them to older TVs.\u00a0After all, the HDMI Forum is asking audio manufacturers to offer ARC as a fallback option.\u00a0However, it remains a question, it is not an obligation.\u00a0For a soundbar manufacturer that is now releasing a device, it would be commercial suicide not to support ARC, but who knows what it will be like in a few years when eARC has become commonplace.\u00a0Perhaps you will get sound bars that do not want to work with TVs that only have HDMI-ARC.<\/p>\n There is a connection between the new\u00a0HDMI 2.1 standard<\/strong>\u00a0and eARC.\u00a0But you don’t need one for the other.\u00a0eARC is just like a number of other new functions (such as Auto-Low Latency Mode or ALLM) also available with HDMI 2.0.\u00a0So you see, for example, AV receivers that support eARC, but not 4K \/ 120fps or 8K that makes HDMI 2.1 possible.\u00a0From 2021 we expect that new audio devices will all support HDMI 2.1.\u00a0Actually, that should probably already be the case in the autumn of 2020, but due to the corona crisis, many soundbars and receivers have been postponed.<\/p>\n Even more fundamental than the other technology, there is a completely different philosophy behind eARC than with ARC.\u00a0With eARC, the television becomes the central hub to which all sources are connected.\u00a0So all audio from source devices goes to the television and is then sent through the TV to the audio device that is connected to the HDMI eARC port.\u00a0Even if you own an\u00a0AV receiver<\/strong>\u00a0, the HDMI Forum thinks, you would still have all sources connected to the television.\u00a0The main reason for doing this is that you no longer have to switch an AV receiver because a new HDMI standard is emerging.\u00a0After all, most HDMI updates revolve around video enhancements.<\/p>\n With ARC you had to replace both the receiver and the screen if you wanted to take advantage of those innovations (or hang your source devices on your TV), with eARC you only have to change the display.\u00a0A practical consequence of that eARC philosophy is.\u00a0that more and more audio devices only have one HMDI port.<\/p>\n This trend is already visible in sound bars.\u00a0Connecting a console or TV decoder directly to your soundbar is no longer recommended.\u00a0As long as your TV has enough inputs, that’s not so bad.\u00a0It is important to the eARC philosophy that all sound (including from those source devices) is brought to the soundbar in the highest quality.\u00a0The eARC philosophy implicitly implies that there is some kind of passthrough option in your TV settings.\u00a0How else would the audio stream from a video source reach your audio device unchanged?\u00a0But this is where the problem is, because in practice this passthrough option sometimes turns out not to be there.\u00a0For example, it appears that some new LG and Samsung TVs do not transmit DTS streams – possibly due to licensing discussions, although we do not receive confirmation.<\/p>\n If you don’t have a headache yet, we would like to give you one last push towards migraines by pointing out that Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services do offer Dolby Atmos soundtracks.\u00a0But not always and not on every device.\u00a0For the average consumer it is a soup.\u00a0Netflix on our LG C9 in the living room and the Sony KD-A9F in the test room offers roughly the ‘Space Force’ series with Atmos.\u00a0But with the slightly older Samsung TV from 2016 that is normally also used for tests, you get Dolby Digital 5.1 with the same series.\u00a0The differences sometimes have to do with technology, but also often with license agreements.\u00a0A tangle that reviewers can hardly get over, let alone the ordinary consumer.<\/p>\n Dolby Atmos is a great experience with the right audio device or surround setup.\u00a0But if you really want to experience it, then you have to find out that your source can deliver it.\u00a0Admittedly, this is probably only a challenge if your television is a little older.\u00a0A new eARC-compatible device may support Dolby Atmos via the apps of streaming services.\u00a0And otherwise you have to invest in a suitable media player, such as an nVidia Shield (2019) or an Apple TV 4K.\u00a0But beware: an older TV will not necessarily forward an audio stream arriving on an HDMI channel unchanged to the HDMI-ARC port.\u00a0Maybe that Dolby stream will be converted to stereo.<\/p>\n There is another big unknown: what will the next-gen consoles offer?\u00a0We suspect that the next Xbox will deploy on Dolby Atmos, just like the current Microsoft console, but it looks like Sony will opt for MPEG-H with the PlayStation 5 – a 3D codec that is used by TV channels in Asia. has made modest progress.\u00a0At Sony, that codec is ‘disguised’ with the name 360 \u200b\u200bReality Audio.<\/p>\n On paper, eARC appears to be the solution to many of the problems people encountered with HDMI-ARC.\u00a0But was the standard the real problem?\u00a0No, if something didn’t work properly, it was also how manufacturers implemented the technology, often with their own unofficial approach or adaptation.\u00a0eARC seems better equipped against this, but we are already noticing that the new standard is not being used quite as expected.\u00a0The universal pass-through from HDMI input on the TV to the eARC port appears to have limitations in practice, for example.\u00a0And that obviously undermines the hoped-for universality of eARC.\u00a0The fact that the discovery phase is now better organized is very positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is HDMI eARC exactly? For that, we must first talk about its predecessor, HDMI-ARC.\u00a0This standard has been around for a while and as the name indicates, this technology is part of the broader HDMI standard.\u00a0Version 1.4 to be exact, which was introduced over eleven years ago.\u00a0HDMI-ARC meant a breakthrough in ease of use, because […] More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10402,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[641],"tags":[779],"class_list":{"0":"post-113688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tv","7":"tag-news"},"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10402"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Trend 3: Surround goes for 3D<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/Dolby-Atmos-1080x633.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe same, but different<\/h2>\n
More bandwidth<\/h2>\n
ARC is not eARC<\/h2>\n
HDMI 2.1<\/h2>\n
The TV as a central hub<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/connections.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhere can you find Atmos?<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nXbox Series X and PlayStation 5<\/h2>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n