Roger’s $0.02 - Did You Try Unplugging It? (Patreon)

One of the old standbys when troubleshooting any piece of electronics is power cycling it. You know the old turn it off and turn it on again. Well, this past weekend I experienced a variation of the handyman’s aphorism and it turns out the solution to fix it was closer to the wall.

I recently picked up a new Yamaha sound bar to replace an older Vizio model that was on its last legs. Nothing fancy but it had the required pre-subwoofer out so I could use it with my 20-year-old 8-inch subwoofer, had HDMI passthrough and most importantly it was on sale. The pre-subwoofer out was key. Unfortunately, most sound bars no longer feature a discrete subwoofer output opting to sell you a complete package instead. While this is entirely more convenient it does leave you at the mercy of the manufacturer’s choice on subwoofers, which tend to be slightly muddy-sounding models built around a smallish 6” driver. Plus most subwoofers included in a sound bar package are wireless. Again good for convenience but at the cost of upgradability as the wireless systems they use are often proprietary meaning you can’t upgrade the subwoofer at a later date and if you can you can only select from a few in-brand models. I keep an old Cambridge SoundWorks subwoofer kicking around mostly because it still works and does a decent job of reproducing frequencies down to 39Hz. Sure the Yamaha has a subwoofer built into the sound bar itself but it's a little boomy for my tastes. So I dial down the subwoofer levels in the sound bar, turn off the crossover on the subwoofer, and then set the appropriate volume on the subwoofer. So far so good.

The other feature I needed is the HDMI passthrough specifically with eARC (enhanced Audio Return Channel). If you’re new to Home Theater eARC is a communication standard for HDMI interfaces that allows the devices to pass audio through multiple Home Theater devices. Also, most eARC-ready devices also support the CEC (Consumer Electronic Control) protocol which means I can control everything through a single remote. Basically, I can turn on my TV and have it turn on my sound bar and my Nvidia Shield at the same time and have the audio routed correctly and set to the appropriate sound mode. All of this sounds great. When I first got the Yamaha sound bar I plugged in everything right away and was treated to improved sound and convenience. Then I got the bright idea to move things over to another HDMI input on my TV because I wanted to test something and that’s where my troubles began.

After replugging everything back together I noticed none of my devices worked together. No one remote to activate everything, control volume or switch to OTA on the TV. Curses I thought. I messed something up when I moved HDMI ports. So I replaced all the cables back into their original positions. Nothing. Ahh, maybe I was using an old cable that somehow became defective with all the cable swapping? Fine pulled out some spare HDMI cables and swapped those in. Still nothing. It’s probably a communication issue. I need to make sure the TV and Shield’s CEC modes are enabled. So turn those options off. Reboot the Shield and power cycle the TV. I then turned the CEC back on but the problem persists. The TV devices don’t see each other. Okay, it's the sound bar. Let me remove that from the equation. I directly connect the TV and Shield together and power cycle everything again. Nothing. Desperate I updated the firmware in my TV. Would you believe it? No luck. Annoyed with the universe I unplugged everything and went to bed. The next morning I plugged everything back in. The Shield, sound bar, and TV are all connected to each other. I turn on the TV and the Shield and sound bar turn on as well. It all works! I’m summarizing what might have happened but enough residual power remained in the TV for it to not fully reboot during a normal power cycle. But letting it drain overnight reset things.

The whole experience taught me an interesting lesson. Even when you have industry standards, not everything will work together due to errors in design, manufacturing, or firmware, and when things don’t seem to be working try leaving everything unplugged overnight.