I know that Arc stands for Audio Return Channel, but I cant find a cliffs notes on what exactly that means.
Does it mean its the best HDMI port to use for music/high quality audio?
In: 41
ARC stands for “audio return channel,” which is an HDMI protocol introduced in 2009 . It allows your TV to send audio data to a compatible soundbar, AV receiver, or other sound system using an HDMI cable . This feature is designed to reduce the number of cables between your TV and an external home theatre system or soundbar .
It means you can connect an audio device, like a sound bar, to your tv and transmit your TVs sound to that. It doesn’t have anything to do with sound quality. It’s a way you can simplify your home theater set up, so you don’t have to plug all your devices into the sound bar.
Best think of it this way: the HDMI ports in your TV are *inputs*, i.e. you can feed video and audio signals *into* the TV to be displayed.
Now, the ARC port has a special trick up its sleeve: it can also *output* audio to whatever device is connected there. And it always outputs exactly the audio signal that the TV would also play on its speakers.
Obviously, e.g. your BluRay player has no use for such an audio signal – but there are devices which have: in particular a sound bar can use this signal to play the audio that your TV plays.
In short: this is a simple way to connect your sound bar to your TV with the same kind of cable that you use for all the other connections.
As others have said, ARC sends audio from the TV to a sound bar, amplifier, etc.
Previously you’d have to attach all your various DVD players, games consoles, cable/satellite boxes to the audio receiver and have that do the switching of the source when you wanted to go from gaming to movie night.
With ARC all your sources connect to your TV and the TV does the switching, it can also control the audio equipment, turning it on, changing the volume, etc. so that you only need to use the TV remote. An additional benefit is that it can also send audio from apps on a smart tv.
So, I’ve got a TV. Big ol’ honkin’ thing on the wall. I also have a nice home theater receiver that feeds all my HDMI stuff to my TV while pumping the tunes on my 1.25KW sound system.
Problem is, I also like to watch broadcast TV on occasion (I have a big ol’ antenna! In the attic! How quaint!). Normally I’d be forced to either a) listen to that over the TV’s built-in speakers, or b) run a separate (probably optical) cable back down to my sound system so that the TV can output its broadcast audio to it.
Enter ARC – what it allows me to do is have the sound system output all the video to the TV on that HDMI cable, *and* get an audio feed back *from* the TV to play, all on one cable. Is it a huge deal? Maybe! Idunno! It sure is convenient though!
It’s for when you want sound to go from the tv to a connected device rather than the other way around. Such as when you are either watching content with a smart tv app and want to hear the audio on your surround receiver or say a roku plugged into the tv rather than the receiver but still want the playback on the receivers speakers.
Ok nobody so far has posted the right answer as to why there is ARC.
Its nothing to do with saving cables. Its to match the latency of the display screen.
A lot of screens are actually quite delayed. You gotta pay good money for a TV or display that doesn’t actually lag behind time by a 30th of a second or so.
Imagine if your audio went to your stereo (no lag) but also to your TV with crap sound, and is laggy.
Lemme try to give you an eli5 answer. Normal hdmi sends images and sounds to the tv. Arc hdmi can also send TV sounds to the speakers. Like for smart tvs with built-in apps.
It lets your tv input and output on the same cable. The big one nobody is mentioning is that It lets you control the volume on your audio system with one remote. It also lets your tv automatically turn on and off your audio whenever your tv is on and switch audio sources. Say you have a playstation, Xbox, fire stick, chromecast, switch and such. Whatever you are using as the input to your tv will output audio to the sound system through the arc instead of having to go through the sound system as well. For actual sound quality, a fiber optic cable is probably better. Used to be in the way back time of the long ago, there were a ton of audio inputs on your sound system you had to hook everything to the head unit on your sound system and have a second remote for it changing the input any time you switched devices. It was a pain in the ass making it where anytime you had people over they would never know how to use the tv. It basically mutes the tv sound and turns the sound system into the tv speakers seamlessly without having to do a bunch of bullshit like, using a ton of cables and keeping up with one more remote.
Kinda like turning a HDMI cable from a one-way street, into a two-way street, in case the audio can come from either end?
Imagine watching cable TV:
**[Cable box]** — audio & video via HDMI –> **[AV receiver]** — video via HDMI –> **[TV]**
Or watching Netflix on your TV with the same setup:
**[AV receiver]** <– audio via HDMI (ARC) **[TV]**
In the above example, ARC enables the audio to go either way, in the HDMI connection between AV receiver and TV.
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