Someone has a 65 inch U7900F feeding an older Vizio SB3820-C6, and because that bar has no HDMI input he is running eARC out of HDMI 1 into a converter box and then SPDIF into the soundbar. With the panel speakers and the bar both live he hears a subtle echo, and Samsung support told him there is no fix. His workaround is muting the TV at every startup, because Settings, Sound Output shows TV Speakers with a check mark next to it and no on/off toggle.
Two things worth separating here. The echo is real, but a few microseconds of offset is not what he is hearing, that is far too small to perceive. What that chain produces is the TV's internal decode arriving essentially instantly while the SPDIF path goes out through a converter and into a bar that adds its own processing delay, and that gap lands in the milliseconds. If the bar had a lip sync or audio delay control you could pull the two closer together, but never to zero, so silencing one side is genuinely the answer.
The bigger annoyance is that Samsung has never given us a plain speaker off switch. Selecting an external output normally cuts the panel drivers, and the fact that this particular configuration does not is exactly the sort of edge case a check box solves in one tap. It is not a hardware limit. It is a menu built around the assumption that everyone runs ARC end to end and nobody has old kit in the middle.
Anyone got a converter box in the chain like this and found a Samsung menu path that silences the internal drivers for good?
Two things worth separating here. The echo is real, but a few microseconds of offset is not what he is hearing, that is far too small to perceive. What that chain produces is the TV's internal decode arriving essentially instantly while the SPDIF path goes out through a converter and into a bar that adds its own processing delay, and that gap lands in the milliseconds. If the bar had a lip sync or audio delay control you could pull the two closer together, but never to zero, so silencing one side is genuinely the answer.
The bigger annoyance is that Samsung has never given us a plain speaker off switch. Selecting an external output normally cuts the panel drivers, and the fact that this particular configuration does not is exactly the sort of edge case a check box solves in one tap. It is not a hardware limit. It is a menu built around the assumption that everyone runs ARC end to end and nobody has old kit in the middle.
Anyone got a converter box in the chain like this and found a Samsung menu path that silences the internal drivers for good?