Buyers unbox an expensive soundbar, connect the cable, and press play. But the dialogue collapses immediately.
Those midrange frequencies just vanish. Honestly, the soundbar sounds completely hollow. The audio failure frustrates owners, but broken hardware rarely causes the problem.
The real issue is almost always a hidden television setting they don’t know to look for.
Television manufacturers prioritize basic compatibility over audio fidelity out of the box. They default their digital streams to a format called PCM. Standard HDMI cables can’t handle the data load. They restrict that signal to standard stereo. Premium soundbars recognize the limited bandwidth, so they instantly attempt to compensate for the missing audio.
These external devices apply internal audio upmixing. It’s a software trick meant to simulate a surround-sound room, but it fails terribly. The artificial processing creates a nasty echo effect. The mistake ruins the entire listening experience.
You don’t need to return your expensive equipment. To resolve the echo, owners must dig into their television menus to locate the exact format toggles. Brands like LG, Samsung, and Sony usually bury these controls deep inside advanced sound sub-menus. The exact solution—detailed in an audio setup guide by XDA Developers—requires a single manual adjustment. Users must change the output format from ‘PCM’ to ‘Passthrough’.
Passthrough mode sends the raw audio stream directly from the source to the soundbar. The television processor gets bypassed completely. Internal hardware then decodes the Dolby Digital or DTS track natively. And the direct pipeline instantly restores the dynamic range.
Why a Misconfigured TV Setting Bottlenecks Standard ARC Audio
Older ARC connections lack the necessary bandwidth to carry uncompressed audio. Modern eARC hardware handles multichannel PCM natively.
If a home theater uses eARC on both the television and the soundbar, the standard PCM limitation disappears. Many households still operate mixed-generation hardware. So manually forcing Passthrough remains the reliable configuration for clear audio.
The hardware communicates properly. The cinematic experience finally matches the high price tag.