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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> That is _extremely_ convenient.

I'm open to having my mind changed but I have not really experienced this extreme convenience in practice. The vast majority of things I plug a HDMI cable into either don't have speakers or if they do, the speakers are a bad quality afterthought.

In actual fact, what has been an extreme inconvenience is the OS thinking I want HDMI audio instead of whatever much higher-quality* alternative output I actually want to direct my audio to.

The only time I've ever gotten high-quality audio output over HDMI is via ARC, which says a lot about the need for HDMI audio...

* When I say "much higher-quality", I don't mean HDMI is a low-quality audio transport, I mean the HDMI output devices more often than not have inferior audio output to some other bluetooth / 3.5mm jack device I am using.

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Audio over HDMI or DP has never been anything but a nuisance on my windows workstations. Windows finds a way to set the speaker monitor/mic as the system defaults at least once a month for me. Every GPU driver update I end up disabling the display's audio in device manager. Hrm... maybe I could write a script to do it at boot.

I think it could make sense in budget friendly setups, but... personally I'd pay extra to not have to deal with the nuisance and security risk of microphone input I can't physically disable.

It was very convenient for me to have my headphones plugged into the monitor. Made it so I could plug a single cable over to my laptop and have basically everything else already done.

Every monitor I've ever had has had terrible coil-whine from the headphone jack. I always try them for exactly this reason, and get super annoyed each time. It didn't have to be this way!

I have this problem on my gaming monitor, thankfully it also has USB-A ports so a cheap adapter has solved it.

I have no idea if there are downsides to audio over USB-A but for my fairly basic use case (“being able to hear things and not hear coil whine”) it works pretty well.

Depends what your usb device is, all told. I have a USB C amp for audio that really is quite nice.

> headphones plugged into the monitor

That sounds cool but I've never see a monitor with a jack. Mine all have many USB ports, but not audio. How common are they?

An audio jack is very common. Some even come with speakers. They are usually not very good but they get the job done in a pinch.

I use 2 computers connected to the same monitor via hdmi and use barrier (and a script) to switch screens. The audio for the correct monitor gets activated automatically. It's very convenient.

All the dell midrange monitors I've bought (IE, $400-$1K) have audio jack for headphones.

Interesting you say Dell as most of mine are Dell (3 Dells + 1 MSI), same price range, 2 bought very recently, no audio.

I wonder is it a regional thing (in EU)

I have a 144Hz 1080p AOC monitor and a secondary generic LG one, both have an audio jack

I have a 3.5mm audio jack on a cheap 4k LG monitor I've been using for years

HDMI was designed to accommodate home theaters. That usually means a sound system with good speakers. Not every user needs this expanded feature set, but enough do that DisplayPort does not make a good alternative.

Here's where ARC/eARC really benefit me, and I don't see how this problem could be solved with DisplayPort.

I have a PC and a PS5 that support Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) over HDMI. I bought a new TV last year that also supports VRR, but I did not want to replace my perfectly adequate 3 year old reciever that does not support VRR. Even today, VRR support on recievers is questionable at best, and most users likely want their VRR devices plugged directly into their TV.

Thanks to eARC, I can plug my PS5 or PC directly into my TV and have it send the PCM 7.1 surround sound audio to the reciever over HDMI. I can still leave other devices like an Apple TV or Blu-Ray player plugged into the reciever, and everything just works.

Without eARC, I would have to fall back on TOSlink. That means extra cables, and dropping down to compressed dolby digital 5.1 if I want to keep surround sound. Using dolby digital on a game console incurs a pretty noticeable latency penalty, which is why they all default to PCM.

I have never once used hdmi audio for anything but an a/v type experience. Monitor speakers are generally garbage, monitors generally don't support bluetooth for audio connectivity, their headphone jacks are often in hard to reach places, and I have yet to find on that supports a microphone. Just easier to go directly to the machine for audio.

One extremely convenient situation for me is getting sorround sound from the TV to the AV receiver in a single cable.

I have an audio extractor that conveniently passes the sound from HDMI to my desktop speakers. The extractor is connected between my HDMI input switcher and the [primary] monitor, so whichever device I'm currently using outputs the audio to the speakers.

I use my PC to drive a TV for gaming and all I have to do is switch the sound output in Windows from Speakers to TV and I'm good to go. No need for splitters and multiple cables to get sound to both devices. The only thing I would change is to have Windows support outputting audio to both devices regardless, but keeping the settings menu open to the right page isn't really an inconvenience.

All of my consoles work the same way: just run a single HDMI cable for each one.

The counter point might be that my TV would have "bad audio." But I don't think so (at least not at the volumes I prefer), and even if it did, it supports audio out to connect the TV audio to a separate hi-fi.

TV connection is a pretty big use case where audio matters.

i have 3 computers plugged into my 4k tv (monitor) via hdmi. tv to dac via optical. works fine for audio+video at 4k60hz.

I plug my computer into my AV receiver all the time, and my speakers are worth more than my TV.

If your receiver doesn't support eARC, you are definitely not getting full resolution audio.

I don't use ARC at all (all audio sources go through the receiver), so that's a non-issue for me.

That's fine. Let me rephrase: if you're not using the latest and greatest HDMI protocol you're not getting full fidelity audio.

Besides the DTS passthrough (which works just fine), it supports 48kHz PCM from my media-center, so I don't know what more is needed.

Again, that is fine. Besides getting an uncompressed 2 channel signal; anything above 2 channels is going to be compressed and frequencies carved out of the additional channels due to the encoding process. Thus a loss of fidelity. You "may" get a multi channel signal, but it is not 1:1. There are plenty of papers written about the subject since it's nearly a 50 year old technology.

My laptop definitely supports up to 8 channels (7.1) of uncompressed PCM over HDMI. I've tested my receiver up to 5.1 (I don't have an 8-speaker setup) and it works.

[edit]

I have an Intel IGP; Intel has supported this since the G45 (Core 2 Duo era), AMD added it in the HD 4800 era, and nVidia in the GeForce 8300 era. Support for this is over a decade old at this point.

The "stereo only uncompressed" is a S/PDIF legacy, and while HDMI does support S/PDIF, it was already "the bad old way" when Bluray players came out (though it took a few years for discrete GPU makers to catch up).

Might I suggest reading up on how both DTS and Dolby encode audio then.

DTS and Dolby are unrelated to uncompressed LPCM. HDMI 1.0 supports up to 8-channels, up to 192kHz, and up to 24-bits of depth. In practice, my laptop to my receiver can definitely do 24-bit 48kHz PCM at 8 channels, and that's certainly "full fidelity" for most setups.

If you're sending audio and audio only then sure. Wouldn't be my solution from my professional opinion though.

Uncompressed multichannel LPCM works along-side video just fine. The only thing you have said in this thread that is true has been about eARC/ARC, yet you've doubled-down on your statements even when I made it clear that I'm not using ARC.

My mistake was speaking with an audio consumer and not an engineer.

Do you not have a proper home A/V setup?

Almost everything I use for media sends audio and video to my receiver over HDMI; the exception is analog sources, which go into a mixer whose output is digitized and sent over CAT-6 cable to an optical converter sitting on the receiver.

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