ARC question

[Scam]

So I've inherited an Onkyo TX-SR578 receiver.. Using it with my Panasonic GT60 and stereo speakers everything seems great. Everything plugged into the HDMIs into the Onkyo as expected.

I originally hooked up my TV sound into the Onkyo via optical, but realised I could use ARC. So with a bit of fiddling, this works great for the TV sound.

On my last HDMI input on the Onkyo I'm currently using a HDMI splitter going in, with my Xbox, AppleTV (and will add RaspberryPi Kodi).

My question is, would I be better off plugging these straight into the TV's HDMIs and would the ARC work for those too? (I'm hoping so?). That way it saves me the extra button pushes on the switcher. Any downsides in doing that? To be honest none of those devices get used much at all...

Thanks!

 

[Scam]

Hmn OK yes I just read about that. Bearing in mind I'm only using two stereo speakers I'm unlikely to notice a difference though surely!

 

[Scam]

Well I have a Panasonic GT60 so will investigate what that does..

On a sidenote, seen as I've inherited the Onkyo my Marantz pm6010ose stereo amp is still packed away in it's box. Poor thing I'm not 100% sure of the musical audio from the Onkyo and have started reading about attaching a stereo amp to an AV receiver. Would this be possible in an easy way? It would be nice to give my Marantz a run-out when I'm listening to my music..

 

[Scam]

Yeah, looks like it has a subwoofer pre-out only.

If you don't need the audio decoding of the 576 amp then you could potentially dispense with it all together. Run all the sources in to the TV. Take optical out to a small DAC that will then convert to stereo audio. Feed that direct in to the Marantz and the stereo speakers.

I was debating this, but considering I have my two floorstanding stereo speakersa I'm half-heartedly wondering if it would be worth adding (possibly) a sub and centre speaker to make some sort of ghetto 5.1. Or maybe just 4.0 but I've no idea about that. Just keeping my options open. I do have a DAC and optical cables though, I was using that before I figured out the ARC.

The sheer amount of devices attached to this setup is a bit silly so to be honest an AV receiver is probably easier:

- TV
- Sonos Connect
- CD Player
- Bluray Player
- Humax PVR
- FireTV
- AppleTV
- Xbox 360
- Mac Mini (work streaming player)
- RaspberryPi Kodi

Bearing in mind I'd never set up an AV receiver before and had to remove a super-old Pioneer plasma (and receiver box for it) I was supremely chuffed when I got everything working first time. The girlfriend just sat there and complained about how complicated it was. Women...