> 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.

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 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.

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

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.

> 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?

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> DP _theoretically_ supports audio too, but AFAIK that's not widely implemented

I'm using my monitor's speaker through DP since GTX 1070 (2016). Currently RTX 4070 Ti and that works too. And it's a pretty mediocre AOC monitor I have.

Unfortunately HDMI audio is also notorious for often having serious lag, both in absolute terms and relative to the video signal.

Are you sure that it's related to HDMI? TVs often do processing on the video signal which introduces lag, but my Samsung TV in "PC Mode" is virtually lag-free (and I use Logitech's receiver for my mouse because Bluetooth feels slightly too laggy for me).

Seems like a bug on the tv part then. They should delay audio accordingly to the lag.

The issue is not with HDMI. The audio data is sent between each frame. The lag comes from the fact that TVs apply post-processing to video which causes it to lag relative to audio.

Isn't the whole idea of routing the audio through the display that it can compensate for any lag due to processing of the video signal? I haven't really noticed any problems with HDMI, and if I did, I think I would blame the display.

No, the point of supporting audio and video on the same cable is for people plugging their DVD player into their TV.

Sounds like you need to upgrade to gold plated HDMI.

Better get that Monster Cable!

That's not HDMI causing that pain. In fact, HDMI includes specific functionality for lip sync correction and enabling devices to expose both audio and video latencies they add to the signal.

Unless the standard has been substantially relaxed since HDMI v1.3a, it sounds like a downstream issue.

Citing § 7.5 normative language:

> An HDMI Source shall be capable of transmitting audio and video data streams with no more than ±2 msec of audio delay relative to the video.

I have been using DP+Audio for the last decade with a wast array of different monitors.

I have two different LG monitors that both support audio over the DP cable.

I have a portable external monitor that is powered and gets video via a single USB C port which I assume is using DP. It also does audio over the cable.

For some reason, outside of video, HDMI knows how to shoot themselves in the foot almost as well as the USB-IF.

HDMI CEC? Has anyone actually got that working correctly?

Anyone remember Ethernet over HDMI? Apparently that was a thing. (Not to be confused with HDMI over Ethernet, which actually has some uses.)

HDMI for soundbars? We got ARC ports (Audio Return Channel). But it was buggy, didn't support lossless audio, needed new DRM, and was bad at maintaining lip sync, so introducing eARC (Enhanced Audio Return Channel). eARC works by... scrapping Ethernet over HDMI and reusing the wires. Better get a new TV that supports it, there's no adapters (downgrading to regular ARC if any part of the chain doesn't support eARC).

CEC "just works" for me and has for as long as I've owned a flat panel TV (maybe 12 years or so?). Back in the day (before I had an HDMI receiver), I could use the TV remote to control the bluray player. These days I have a receiver, and the volume control on pretty much any device will control the audio on the receiver.

ARC was a bit more spotty, but I moved somewhere with no live TV reception, so my only use-case for it went away (everything else routes audio through the receiver).

> HDMI CEC? Has anyone actually got that working correctly

I stay in lots of hotels and take my Roku stick. Most of the time the Roku remote can control the TV volume and power using CEC

HDMI-CEC is great for TVs but when I searched recently I found that both Nvidia and AMD do not support HDMI-CEC. This was disappointing to find out when I built an HTPC for my TV.

Both CEC and eARC have worked without issue for me, for many years.

The audio receiver industry has settled on HDMI being the only way to get uncompressed surround sound (5.1+) from an external device, like a PC. I wish they would do that over USB, too. It sucks having to configure an external display (even if duplicated) just to get good sound.

are you thinking of DVI or something?

I've been using audio over DisplayPort for years and years and years without issue. every device I've ever had that supports DisplayPort supports audio over that connection.

All modern GPUs and monitors (that's have a speaker) support audio-over-DP. They have for over a decade.

It's widely implemented.

I have rather old NVIDIA GPUs and Dell monitors, and both the GPUs and the monitors support audio over DisplayPort.

I doubt that there exists any reasonably recent GPU that does not support audio over DisplayPort, so if there are problems they might be caused by the monitors. I have no idea how many monitors have speakers and DisplayPort without supporting audio over DP.