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Firestick > Beam > Projector?

  • 10 June 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 790 views

Hi all.

I currently have a Samsung TV (Samsung UE40H6700) which I have connected to a Samsung Soundbar (Samsung HWF751).
Occasionally, we use a projector (BenQ W1210ST) by connecting a FireStick to the Soundbar HDMI IN, and then connecting the Soundbar HDMI OUT to the Projector. This all works well.

I am considering upgrading the Soundbar as it's started to drop out randomly and, as we have a few Sonos products, liked the look of the Beam. My issue is that I don't understand how I could get the same functionality without an HDMI OUT on the Beam? And will the Firestick work by plugging into the HDMI Arc input or do I need to use Wifi?

I am confused with how connectivity seems to have decreased since I bought my kit 4 years ago - assume I must be missing something!

Thanks in advance for any advice.
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Best answer by Airgetlam 11 June 2019, 02:11

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3 replies

My apologies if I've misunderstood your question.

I think what you're missing here is that the TV is the "hub" of the system. The Beam connects to the TV set via HDMI-ARC, so that anything that you're sending to the TV on any of the other inputs will be reflected back out the Beam.

So, your Firestick would just plug in to another HDMI input on the TV, and the audio would be automatically reflected back to the Beam via the HDMI-ARC connection

Does that make sense?
Thanks Bruce. Yes that makes sense for how it usually works.

However, my question is for when I don't want to see the image on my TV - I want it to be projected onto a large screen instead via the BenQ projector.

To do this I need to bypass the TV completely and, until now, have used the Samsung Soundbar as the hub. The Firestick plugged into that and the video was routed through the Soundbar to the projector, while the audio played through the soundbar. This meant the TV could be switched off.

That was done through using the HDMI In and HDMI out on the soundbar so I'm not sure how I can have a similar setup with the Beam since it doesn't have as many connections...
In that use case, I would actually consider an external HDMI switch, and change the output to the Beam over to an optical connection from the switch. That way, you can just swap where the video is being sent, but still have the audio playing all the time. You’d lose capabilities for any of the “smart” apps on the TV to play audio, though.