eARC is neat in theory, but my experience with it has been that’s too unreliable and unstable to actually use in practice.

I even bought new cables to make sure there wouldn’t be issues, but eARC audio regularly falls out in ways other sources (including regular ARC) doesn’t. And when it fails there’s literally zero tools for diagnosing it either.

Maybe around the time of eARC2 we’ll have something working as well as Bluetooth does today. (Yes, that’s me being snarky)

I've had good luck with eARC without any intermittent issues. Of course, I'm only using it because my tv has two EDIDs, one that allows 4K video for my streaming box, and one that allows audio for my Blu-Ray player. So I have the streaming player connected directly to the TV and audio over eARC to the reciever instead of going through the reciever. I was pleasantly surprised that this works fine, but not surprised that it doesn't work for everyone.

I’ve had no problems with eARC when used together with my Appletv and LG C1 TV - which I’m happy about because the appletv does not offer any other wired audio ports.

That's unfortunate. I've been hoping to simplify my HT setup and eARC was something I wanted to target in an upgrade

> The older ARC spec would work with any HDMI cable, but bandwidth limitations only allowed compressed 5.1 surround sound.

My 2012 Denon AVR-1913 won't do ARC with just any HDMI cable. According to the manual it must be an HDMI with ethernet cable and experiment has shown that the manual is correct.

actually, if i understand correctly, earc doesn't use HEC. it just re-purposes hec wiring for something useful

It uses the same pins, but it doesn't actually use Ethernet. I'm pretty sure it's IEC 60958/61937, like SPDIF.