LG C9 + Arc + UB820 / Multichannel PCM for DTS Blu-Ray discs

@iBoyley 

Have you been able to test the unplug method?

@JockWu  thanks. Did you have to keep the blu ray player on when you did the unplug / plug as @iBoyley  suggested? I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. 

Yes. The blu-ray player was on when I unplugged the CX.

Update:

I tried Die Hard UHD this morning. TV had been switched off overnight. Result: silence.

Then I unplugged the CX. The sound returns!

I’ll do some more testing...

So, I’ve tested while having the blu ray player on with the film playing and pulled the plug for a while and still no joy with the GX. Has anyone else confirmed this method working for the Panasonic?

At present with the Dr HDMI I can replicate the LG EDIDs to play anything with DOLBY Vision that has a Dolby soundtrack. For anything with regular HDR or a non Dolby track I can use the UHD GREEN 1 setting.

The only scenario that I can’t cover is when there’s DV and DTS together, which fortunately seems rare. in this case the picture would be HDR only but at least I’ll get full surround sound. The only one I can see in my collection at a glance that has DV and DTS is Gladiator. 
 

@Laird M Malamed @Chetiya @AaronT

After all this knowledge and your experience, what would you guys suggest I get in my situation? I have the CX - UB820 - ARC with Surrounds. When I am not watching my Blu Rays I currently use the apps built into the CX for streaming, but I do plan to get an Apple TV one day when it seems support for the CX has ended. If y’all were in my situation, would you buy the Arcana or the DR HDMI 4K? It seems the Arcana can achieve DV and DTS simultaneously and the DR HDMI 4K can not (at least it hasn’t been figured out how to do so easily), although those instances where it would be necessary seem rare. The DR HDMI 4K can convert DTS and that’s currently my biggest want but I’m not sure if getting that setup is very user friendly? I’m good with tech but a lot of this stuff is very new to me.

thanks for any help you can provide

Hi @tsb4515 - 

In the situation you are describing, the question of device is not going to be a factor. We are finding that the Arcana or DR HDMI 4K (with edited EDID) are acting as a passthrough to the 820. So, if your 820 is going into input 3 on your CX, the HDFury device sits between the 820 and the TV only. The Sonos Arc HDMI goes into the TV Input 2 (with eARC turned on, HDMI set to bitstream for inputs, and passthrough for eARC out). So, the CX will then pass whichever audio out the eARC to the Sonos. That includes the audio from the 820 (that has passed through the HDFury device), the internal audio from the CX Apps or an AppleTV. 

This works because the AppleTV will output either Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital or PCM audio - all of which will pass correctly through the CX to the Sonos Arc. I suspect other streaming boxes such as Roku or Amazon ones operate similarly. 

At this point, the Arcana can be set up with only 1 setting change (audio routed to both eARC and HDMI Output), so it is much easier to use. $100 easier? That is a question each person would have to answer.

Lastly, I am not following your point on DR HDMI converting DTS. My understanding is that no changes to the image or audio is done by the device. Instead, the device tells the source device which formats of audio/video are supported by devices downstream. So, in the case of getting multichannel audio out of the 820, what is working is that the HDFury device corrects an EDID mismatch between the 820, C9/CX, Sonos. However, any decoding of DTS to MC PCM must be done by the Blu-ray player (since the Sonos Arc cannot do it).

Hope that helps.

@Laird M Malamed I checked and my 820 is set to have downsampling at 48k, though its also not clear to me whether that only applies to the optical output or if it also affects hdmi.

I used the Advantiv EDID Editor which can be downloaded here: https://ez.analog.com/video/w/documents/750/advantiv-edid-editor

I also looked at the wikipedia page on EDID as a reference to double-check that everything really made sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identification_Data

I definitely needed to reference the wikipedia page to confirm that the Vendor Specific Data Block that I found was for Dolby Labs and therefore was probably what was providing DV info.

I forgot about the HDFury EDID collection when I was initially testing things out. I did go and check out the readme and files later, and I see that many do specifically say they include DV support, but it wasn’t clear to me which of those I should use from the file names that would provide all of the other correct features and support for the LG TV and Sonos Arc.

Is there any way that you could upload the file somwehere for other uses to download onto their DR HDMI unit? That wikipedia page may aswell be in chineese for me :)

Quick update - I’ve got an Arcana now and can confirm it works with the GX/Panasonic/Sonos combo.
 

One odd quirk is when the Panasonic starts playing a disc the video input drops for a good few seconds, long enough for the “no input” wallpaper screen to show up. The Arcana manual alludes to this happening when switching display modes (HDMI renegotiation), however I was surprised at how long it takes to switch. A small price to pay to have the setup working as expected though! 
 

Annoying as hell that you need another device that costs over half the price of the Panasonic player to get this working, though I have to say the Arcana is a nice little piece of kit with quite a few handy settings (none of which I actually need as it’s set to simply output everything straight to the TV)!