Denon X3400H and ARC/Optical Issues

u07jrb

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I have a weird one. Had this amp and a TV for ages. Never used the ARC function or HDMI control as briefly tried it and it didn't work. I wasn't fussed as I used optical.

I recently got a new TV so tried to see if I can get it to work. My setup is a LG OLED G1 which uses some 18GBPS baluns between it and the AMP. There is a separate optical over ethernet connection.

I had a play about and managed to get the HDMI control to work so I could turn on the AMP when turning on the TV, bypassing the need for my harmony remote. When this control is on it automatically enables ARC. When this happens it locks out the TV source on the AMP for the ARC. Now this TV source doesn't seem to get any ARC sound back and I have given up trying to get it to work as I'm guessing it might be the baluns.

Thing is, I though ok, I can still use this AMP control and still use the optical sound. Trouble is when I have this HDMI control on the main speakers will not play the optical sound (which I reassigned from TV to AUX2 as TV gets locked out for ARC). Now this is the weird bit. If I turn zone 2 and switch it to AUX 2 I can hear the sound in my second room. This indicates to me that the TV is sending the optical signal to the AMP ok. For some reason its not playing to MAIN. Exactly the same happens if I turn HDMI control off but put ARC on.

Its like if you have ARC enabled you cant play sound from optical to MAIN but you can play it from Optical to zone 2?????? Note that I always reboot each device each time I made changes and even switched both off (including baluns) for 30 mins to see if that will help
 
Ok so I have searched the forums and saw something about removing all HDMI inputs before enabling ARC as sometimes they can interfere with it. I did this and did a reboot of the devices.

I went to terrestrial tv and selected ARC and had no sound so I thought it didn't work. Then I switched to HDMI 2 which is the ARC to the AVR so I could disable HDMI control and ARC again and I started hearing the sound from the terrestrial TV channel which to me means that the ARC is getting back to the AMP.

I am really confused now as I thought if I wanted ARC I could select any input such as TV or an app like youtube and select the sound output as ARC and it would play the sound as long as ARC is on and the Denon is set to TV source. IT appears like I need TV to be set to the HDMI input of the ARC which defeats the purpose of having ARC.

I am so confused. Can anyone enlighten me. My takeaway from this is that I can get ARC to work somehow but not how I expected.
 

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