owen-b
Standard Member
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2007
- Messages
- 15
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 30
Hi all, just got my first Sonos (a One SL) and love it! Now I'm considering a Beam for our smallish front room and old 42" Panasonic with Apple TV and a couple of game consoles. I think an Arc is probably overkill for us but still researching...
Our sources are:
What I want is the best possible audio from our sources - 5.1 I guess, as I heard there's not much out there that presents in Atmos, but I'm a total newbie when it comes to audio formats so please do educate me! If I get the basic soundbar working I can expand to add a sub and two satellites later.
Problem is, although one of the HDMIs on the Panny is ARC, and it also has an optical digital audio out, I gather from research that Panny's only send stereo through these no matter what it's fed from a source. Plus, to send from the ARC I'd be down to one HDMI in, and we already have three sources.
So I'm guessing I need a decent HDMI switch that can extract audio and send it separately?
That way I can connect all the devices into the switch, send the audio to the Beam and pictures to the TV. Is that right? It seems there's a whole world of HDMI switches with different capabilities and I don't even fully understand how the routing would work.
I've seen an Octava mentioned here a few times but wowsers it's pricey! Is there an affordable HDMI switch that can do this, that's as future-proof as possible* and ideally can do the magic required to work out what device is on and switch over to that without needing yet another remote?
(* although I guess if we upgraded the TV one day, we'd get one that can handle all this stuff natively without an HDMI switch?)
Our sources are:
- Apple TV 4th Gen (not 4K)
- PS4 (not Pro)
- Nintendo Switch
- mayyyybe one day an XBox or some other HDMI device, but for now it's just the three above
What I want is the best possible audio from our sources - 5.1 I guess, as I heard there's not much out there that presents in Atmos, but I'm a total newbie when it comes to audio formats so please do educate me! If I get the basic soundbar working I can expand to add a sub and two satellites later.
Problem is, although one of the HDMIs on the Panny is ARC, and it also has an optical digital audio out, I gather from research that Panny's only send stereo through these no matter what it's fed from a source. Plus, to send from the ARC I'd be down to one HDMI in, and we already have three sources.
So I'm guessing I need a decent HDMI switch that can extract audio and send it separately?
That way I can connect all the devices into the switch, send the audio to the Beam and pictures to the TV. Is that right? It seems there's a whole world of HDMI switches with different capabilities and I don't even fully understand how the routing would work.
I've seen an Octava mentioned here a few times but wowsers it's pricey! Is there an affordable HDMI switch that can do this, that's as future-proof as possible* and ideally can do the magic required to work out what device is on and switch over to that without needing yet another remote?
(* although I guess if we upgraded the TV one day, we'd get one that can handle all this stuff natively without an HDMI switch?)