HDMI ARC and appletv stupidity.

srichards

srichards

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Because the newer appletvs don't have digital out I've been trying to sort out an alternative before mine dies.

HDMI ARC is supposed to extract the audio and pass it out to another device eg a dac. But it doesn't work for some reason. Or at least it doesn't work on my older appletv. It still has the digital out.

Tv has hdmi arc enabled. No sound at all comes out via the optical out on the audio extractor. It works as normal via the tv. Picture on tv is fine and the digital out on the tv works fine. The digital out on the audio extractor is producing sod all. Not even the menu beeps.

It's not a good solution anyway as I don't particularly want the tv in when listening to music. At the moment the appletv works perfectly by its own digital out but as it's no longer updated in software it will probably stop working altogether at some point. The logical replacement is a newer one and using the hdmi arc facility.

Third party streamers like the Yamaha one I have done appear as a separate library in the iOS Remote app so they seem to use the iPad as a relay and slow it down quite a bit.

Anyone got ARC working with an older appletv or has it working with a current generation one with the tv in standby rather than fully on?

Or is there a trick with musicast devices to behave more like the appletv and stream directly? I can't use my appletv to stream both to its output and to the musicast device I have at the same time. That might fudge it if I can find one with a digital optical out if newer appletvs can.
 
Looks like I'm trying to use it backwards as it seems to be a way of extracting audio from the tv itself not a source device. Poop.

Supplied instructions aren't very clear.

An airplay streamer with digital out and that shows up as a library is what is needed instead.
 
I'm not sure I quite understand. Where is your music and where do you want to hear it? When I had an Apple TV, I had it plugged into an AV receiver via HDMI (no ARC required). The receiver sent video to my TV by HDMI, and audio to speakers via its amp and analogue out. I could stream music from a device running iTunes either to the AppleTV, or directly to the receiver (which was networked and AirPlay-compatible). My only use for ARC would have been be to route the sound from the TV tuner back to the receiver (unfortunately my TV was too old for ARC, so I had to use an extra TOSLINK cable for this instead). I think you'd only need an audio extractor if you wanted to use (e.g.) a DAC without HDMI input.

Today I stream from an Android device to the receiver either via a Chromecast, or the receiver's DLNA renderer, or via a Raspberry Pi running a software DLNA renderer under Kodi (which is preferable because the latter streams gaplessly).
 
At the moment the streamed music is via the appletv and I use the digital toslink out to connect to a DAC and the output of that goes into a normal amp.

In future I won't be able to do that as the newer appletvs don't have a toslink out.

I want to extract the audio from the appletv and pass it to the DAC as I do now but via hdmi instead to make sure I can use that route in future.
 
I have the wrong doodad. I checked with the supplier and I needed something slightly different. :facepalm:

Hopefully that will do what I want.
 
To be honest I would ditch your old apple tv and invest in better device.
 
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