We have the 65” GX TV with the GX soundbar mounted beneath it, plus the LG rears, and it’s all set up neatly enough to please the distaff side...
The 55” 2015 Samsung JS9000 has been moved into the kitchen/diner, and I finally have the GX matched with it on colour and contrast (and brightness even!) on broadcast TV. Of course, on what OLED is good at, the GX blows it clean away; and the JS9000 always had bad staircasing (colour banding)....
I have our UHD Panasonic Player going into the soundbar, as the TV does not do DTS and the soundbar does. (For information, the Panny reports 5.1 audio when used with the soundbar, but only 2.0 stereo when plugged into the TV, from Planet Earth II with its DTS-only 5.1 soundtrack).
Our UHD YouView box goes into HDMI 1 on the TV, but we are getting an issue with the soundbar if we start the TV and soundbar by switching on the YouView box; the soundbar comes on as HDMI, and we get no sound through either the bar or the TV.
I've tried disconnecting the Panny, at the Panny end, in case that was interfering, but it makes no difference.
We can, mostly, solve this by starting the TV first, which makes the soundbar go to eARC, and then putting the YouView box on; but even then, the soundbar sometimes goes to HDMI anyway.
And it’s not just the YouView box that does this; if I put the Panny on an HDMI cable going directly to the TV, I get the same behaviour.
So something about putting the TV on by CEC, and the TV then putting the soundbar on by CEC, seems to make the soundbar come on as HDMI.
It can be then switched to eARC with the F Key on the soundbar remote (or on the TV itself, through that is more complex) after which it is fine, but my wife says that is one or more steps too many, and she is right.
There is no logic to the soundbar defaulting to HDMI, when there is nothing feeding the soundbar’s HDMI input, but there is a TV pushing out eARC to it. The soundbar really ought to detect this and switch to eARC, even if its initial default is HDMI. But it doesn’t.
Anybody had this issue, and knows how to overcome it?
I read somewhere that you can get more control over the soundbar with an LG app, and I have the LG soundbar app on my iPad, and I can go through setup as far as linking the iPad by Bluetooth to the soundbar, after which, the app tells me, I should come back to the app from the iPad Setup option, and continue, except it gives me no means of continuing.
Or maybe I don’t understand the app, and I’m doing it wrong...
Any help for me out there?