I have what I believe is an acceptable setup at home (Denon AVR-X1700H and Apple TV like the OP, a decent Sony display, 7.1 speaker setup, but the plethora of audio coding options completely mystify me. I know this is a me problem. I'm hoping in the new year to watch more movies with the family and would like to make better use of the surround system for sci-fi and action movies but for whatever reason I have no idea where to start.
Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
131–140 of 147 posts
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#132Yup, my AppleTV is the only device that gets CEC right. Even my LG TV and LG soundbar get confused. And don’t get me started on the PS4 Pro’s garbage implementation. I’m sad that Logitech killed Harmony because CEC was supposed to make universal remotes obsolete — they’re still the only way my full home theater can function without juggling a dozen remotes.
I dread the day that Logitech kills the servers for Harmony. If they don't release the IR code database, they're going to have a lot of people (myself included) pretty annoyed. (To be clear, they still work today if you can get a second hand remote / hub.)
Assuming ir means infrared, you could get one of these (or any ir transceiver) and decode the signals and use it or whatever to send them out if your $thing dies.
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
The jack is not driving the bookshelf speakers. They're active. They have their own internal amps. It's simple if you use a receiver. If someone can point me to a receiver that's more like 4 inches than 18 inches, then I'd consider that a solution. Receivers are big boxes as far as I've seen. I don't have space. Or maybe I don't want to make space.
Some of the bigness is just tradition and buyer expectation (big = expensive). But also, modern AVRs are like 1000W devices amplifying 7, 9, even 11 channels of passives. That’s a lot of componentry and corresponding heat to shed— if you open one of those up, it’s not just empty space in there like an NES cartridge or something.
... that said, there is also a small market for "separates" where you have a decoding-only preamp that either feeds active speakers or another box containing just the multi-channel amplification:
https://www.marantz.com/en-ca/category/av-separates/
The output of these units is line-level signals feeding high-impedance loads. They could definitely be a fraction of the size they are.
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems like AV stuff used to be so simple. > without a bulky expensive receiver box A "receiver" has been one of the standard options for making bookshelf speakers work for more than 50 years. A receiver is also not expensive. You can get a basic used one for under $100. I paid $30 for a perfectly working 5.1 Denon receiver with HDMI. Your problem is that you aren't even using "Modern" AV stuff. If you were, your…
Why are receivers so big ? It's not exactly a money issue. I just don't want the big box.
Usually receivers are intended for passive speakers, a lot of the bulk is for housing and cooling amplifiers.
If your speakers are active and don't need an amp, you can use a HDMI audio extractor, those are pretty small (mine is about half the size of my phone)
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#135heh I really enjoyed reading this because I went on a RPI-fueld CEC deep-dive about a year ago when we put a gym in our house. I wanted a simple media center control for the TV/Receiver we had in there. An RPI sits at the center of the thing, and by reading the CEC bus I can respond to various remote commands to launch the media center, bring up security camera feeds, switch the receiver to Bluetooth, start Spotify Connect, etc.
It works well, but CEC most definitely is the buggiest part of the setup. It's a reasonably elegant system, but it's just not implemented very well by most electronics. I ended up putting in a lot of retries: stuff like "send active source command; wait five seconds and send it again." Still, if you're willing to dive into the weeds, you can do some nifty stuff.
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The jack is not driving the bookshelf speakers. They're active. They have their own internal amps. It's simple if you use a receiver. If someone can point me to a receiver that's more like 4 inches than 18 inches, then I'd consider that a solution. Receivers are big boxes as far as I've seen. I don't have space. Or maybe I don't want to make space.
Some of the bigness is just tradition and buyer expectation (big = expensive). But also, modern AVRs are like 1000W devices amplifying 7, 9, even 11 channels of passives. That’s a lot of componentry and corresponding heat to shed— if you open one of those up, it’s not just empty space in there like an NES cartridge or something.
That makes some sense, but for those of us with two channels maxing out at 25W each, there seems to be some use for a smaller one. I think there are more people on the small end of the spectrum than those with a big surround deployment. I suppose they're mostly using sound bars with an HDMI input.
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
The audio part can still be made to be simple. Others have mentioned toslink and I'd like to expand upon that. When you get a new TV and no longer have a headphone jack to plug your powered speakers into, then you can just add a DAC that converts the toslink digital audio that your new TV outputs into the bog-standard line-level analog audio that your speakers understand. DACs like this are available at all price poi…
It's quite hard to know if the DAC is actually decent quality though. I've bought two from Amazon (admittedly at the low price point) and both of them have line noise - one of them even has a ground loop buzz, which surprised me, since it's powered by USB-C. I'm unconvinced that any of the higher price points (that are still within my budget) aren't just these cheapo ones in slightly fancier cases. My old TV had real…
As a broad concept: Cheap, high-function DACs definitely exist.
For instance: Apple-produced headphone adapters for iPhones are inexpensive -- like $10 or so. And inside of that diminutive adapter is buried a whole USB DAC, with a headphone amplifier. It's so seamless and low-cost that some folks think I'm crazy when I tell them this, but they measure great and also work great. (They work great as DAC/headphone amps for PCs, too. Android, not so much: It works, but there's a bug [that will probably never be fixed] relating to volume control and low output level.)
Anyway, I identify as an audiophile. I've spent several decades playing with this stuff, sometimes well beyond the level of "serious hobby." I've made some money doing audio stuff. I've also spent some time in the studio, and in front of the stage, making things sound good.
And I'm practical. I promise you that I can wire up a high-end stereo system with metal coathangers that will sound indistinguishable from something connected using only solid silver Kynar-insulated wire that is jacketed in cloth woven by Benedictine monks from the first cutting of wool from a single virgin albino Bolivian alpaca (for "purity") that has been dyed and imbued with post-civet Kopi Luwak (for "balance"), in any correctly-controlled blind A/B/X test.
Trust your senses. And by that, I mean: If it looks like bullshit, and it smells like bullshit, and it tastes like bullshit, then spit it the fuck out. :)
For sorting inexpensive products that actually work from those that have practical issues like hum or noise: That's what Amazon reviews are for.
But there are some very nice things for sale that aren't stupid-expensive boutique items. Schiit, for example, builds their own designs in the US and charges Buick prices for them instead of Bugatti prices -- and their website shows photos of what the devices look like on the inside, too.
...anyway, ground loops are usually real. Professionally, I've encountered them most-often in residential environments when converting a customer's television into any manner of home theater. 100% of the time I've discovered this, it was because some bonehead grounded the cable TV wire or the satellite dish to some ground that was separate and distinct from the home's electrical ground -- which should never, ever happen.
The loop would show up when we introduced the first bit of gear that had a 3-prong plug into their mix of things that previously only had 2-prong plugs. Adding the AV receiver, the subwoofer, or whatever tied the electrical ground to the stupid ground and current would flow between them, producing noise.
(And USB-C is ground-referenced, so keep that in mind. Toslink, though? That's fiber optic and thus also galvanically isolated.)
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Receivers are big because of the amplifiers. AV receivers have to drive lots of channels. They are all 5.1 or 7.1. But stereo receivers are also huge. I suspect that some of this is tradition because there are small solid state amplifiers. I'm surprised no one has made a small receiver for 2.1 system cause would be pretty common.
If you open a standard sized receiver up, you'll probably see that 50% the space is empty for airflow, 25% of the space is for a large heatsink because they're passively cooled to minimize noise (thus the need for airflow), and 20% of the space is really big capacitors. They do make half size receivers, but they typically only have half the power output. The space savings comes from removing space for airflow and the…
Also 20% for a big heavy transformer.
Sometimes I see cheap "amplifier only" designs that are about the size of a small 2U rackmount, but then you usually give up a lot of inputs and controls; they seem to be used either as PA amplifiers or as "extra room" units in the weird whole-house audio systems that apparently thousands of people had at one point and all dumped in the Goodwill.
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amusingly, my AppleTV is currently the one thing that doesn't even though it used to - for some reason, with no changes, it just stopped turning on the TV. Switch 2 can happily turn on the TV though. Most peculiar. (I've tried updating the AppleTV, replugging the HDMI cable, unplugging the HDMI cable for , etc. Nothing has worked. TV does not have any network which means it can't have had any nefarious updates.)
try rebooting the remote: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102569 it always fixes problems with either turning the tv on/off or volume issues for me
Tried that without success. Also turned off Tailscale just in case that was keeping "alive" and the TV wasn't really getting a "I've turned on" signal - nothing doing. Investigations continue!
Re: Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
#140Yup, my AppleTV is the only device that gets CEC right. Even my LG TV and LG soundbar get confused. And don’t get me started on the PS4 Pro’s garbage implementation. I’m sad that Logitech killed Harmony because CEC was supposed to make universal remotes obsolete — they’re still the only way my full home theater can function without juggling a dozen remotes.
Anyone know how to make a LG TV wake an AppleTV from sleep? Once it's awake buttons presses on the LG remote are passed through to it but I have to keep the Apple remote around for that first step.
I have an LG TV and I haven't seen the remote in months.
Sit down, press button on ATV remote or console controller. TV comes on.
I only needed it when it started complaining about software updates, but now with the AI version I took the TV offline and won't be updating it ever.