Hello,
I have a Philips TV running Android TV 9. My PS4 is connected directly to the TV with an eARC soundbar. The eARC connection itself is working fine since I manage to get DD+ Atmos between the TV and the soundbar. Unfortunately, the PS4 only outputs 2.0 PCM when connected to the TV instead of the expected 7.1 PCM.
Is this "normal" or did I miss something somewhere? I was hoping to rely on a proper eARC connection because the soundbar has only 1 HDMI input.
Thanks!
DD+ Atmos only requires ARC, not eARC. Atmos only needs eARC with Dolby True HD Atmos. It sounds like eARC is not enabled, or your TV only has ARC.
Your using a Soundbar, so how do you know you're only receiving/transmitting 2.0 PCM stereo and not multi-channel?
Android can use PCM-float to mask(convert) a LPCM signal into a two channel transmission, sort of like the old SPDIF standard did for compressed DolbyDigital & DTS; don't worry all the sound bit data is there to have proper amplitude, frequency depth, & multi-channels. But without having a true AVR you couldn't distinguish if there was actually missing channels.
Example, my TV can passthrough LPCM 5.1, but when the TV sees the format going through passthrough it labels it PCM stereo in the TV's onscreen diagnostic. Why, because it is not decoding the bit data only letting it passthrough unmolested, when the AVR gets the PCM data it is then decoded as LPCM 5.1.
Which Philips TV model? It may not have eARC.
Did you check if the eARC option in the TV is turned ON?