The topic Your surround sound setup is broken, but it’s not your speakers’ fault is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Does this sound familiar? Whether your home theater’s surround system is handled by a soundbar or an AV receiver, audio drop-outs and other issues while watching movies or playing games seem to be a fact of life. For me, it gets worse the more devices that are connected to my TV or receiver, with the HDMI signal on each device trying to take over the screen.
It doesn’t have to be like this. HDMI-CEC was designed to make home theater easier by allowing a single remote to control every device in the chain. Perfect, in theory, but once it got into manufacturers’ devices, the whole thing broke down. Maybe that’s why not everyone thinks you need a receiver anymore, but it’s not the individual devices at fault, but rather how they work together.
HDMI-CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) was designed for the expanding needs of home theater setups. We’ve all been there, juggling remote controls to five different devices to get the right balance of sound, or had to power on devices in a certain order for them to connect to our TV or projector correctly. HDMI-CEC was supposed to fix that by letting any device on the HDMI chain control the other devices connected to its HDMI port, and vice versa.
HDMI-CEC was supposed to fix that by letting any device on the HDMI chain control the other devices connected to its HDMI port, and vice versa.
In theory, that would mean you could use any remote for your devices to control your streaming box, receiver, soundbar, TV, or projector, which would be a huge simplification.
HDMI-CEC is a standard set by the HDMI Forum. It shouldn’t be up to the TV manufacturers to call it whatever they wanted, but that’s exactly what happened. Every TV maker decided that CEC wasn’t fancy enough, and now everything is a naming mess.
And since CEC needs to be enabled on every device in the chain, it can be a bit complicated to find the right setting.
You only have to take a minute on Reddit to find hundreds of posts about the issues users have encountered with HDMI-CEC. Anything from your TV randomly turning off, or on, or switching inputs, or losing focus on the surround sound stream for the device you’re using.
The only fix is to try every different configuration of which HDMI cable gets plugged into where, and it takes hours. The worst part is that some devices lose the HDMI handshake when they go to sleep, which breaks the chain you spent all day fixing. The issues compound the more devices you have plugged in. Having multiple inputs on your receiver or TV is great for avoiding cable swaps, but it introduces additional CEC pathways your devices must navigate, which can be problematic.
My advice? Enable CEC for a specific chain, such as streaming box > receiver > TV, and don’t enable it on other devices connected to your TV. Game consoles turn on with their respective controllers, so using the TV remote to turn them on isn’t much of a hardship, and it can make surround sound issues a thing of the past.
The other thing about HDMI-CEC is that it requires every device plugged into your home theater to have it enabled and to have no bugs in the manufacturer’s implementation. That’s easier said than done, which is why there are adapters to remove the CEC link from particularly troublesome devices.
Game consoles are the frequent offender for me. Once they turn on, they like to take over the CEC chain and stop me from watching movies on the Apple TV 4K. Turning off CEC on my Switch 2 is a minor inconvenience to keep the streaming box always available, and the TV is already on when I want to play games.
Most mid-range and even some high-end TVs, require you to turn on high-bandwidth.
Home theater equipment has gotten more complex over the years, but standards like HDMI-CEC were supposed to make them work together in harmony. The number of “universal remotes” on the market over the years proves that HDMI-CEC wasn’t the full answer, but nobody seems to be putting in the effort to fix what is a huge problem for home theater enthusiasts.