Can you link a sound bar to a receiver

[Izzyeck]

I currently have a Sony Receiver, with 5 old speakers attached to the wall at above head height  and a sub on the floor.

The receiver is great and links a DVD player, a game console, a Now Tv box and a Sky Q box, all to a Toshiba TV. We don’t use the TV sound as we have the speakers.

She who must be obeyed, would like to decorate and dispense with the wall speakers and would prefer a sound bar.

How can a sound bar be linked to the Receiver. Is this the right thing to do?

any guidance would be much appreciated.

[royabrown2]

@Izzyeck 

The idea with a soundbar is that it would replace the receiver as well as the speakers, and the devices currently connected to the receiver would be plugged into the soundbar instead.

Or maybe they could be plugged into the TV, which would pass the sound out of the TV down the same HDMI cable that any video and audio would come up from the soundbar (the setup you have with your receiver now), via ARC or eARC, to the soundbar to play.

When you say receiver though, do you habitually listen to FM/AM radio on it? If so, you would need something to replace that feature.

The other gotcha is if any of the existing stuff is SCART, or anyway not HDMI, as pretty much everything is HDMI these days.

So we’ll need to know precisely the model number of the Toshiba TV, and of the Sony receiver, and whether things are connected by HDMI now, or could be connected by HDMI, or if they are limited to SCART, component (5 RCA plugs) or composite (3 RCA plugs) or what.

Depending on the answers, you may have to tell SWMBO that this enterprise will require a new TV. But maybe it won’t come to that, unless you want to engineer it to 😛

My wife is allergic to wires, as wives often are, so this is the compromise we have brokered:-

Wireless sub seen at bottom right in the picture above.

Below is how the rears are handled; the black box on the right is the wireless receiver for them, and on the left you can see the left rear, with its cable running up inside the stand; the right rear is the same at the other end of the sofa. 

Not by any standards a compromise really, and it shows what can be done.

[Izzyeck]

Thanks to royabrown2 for your suggestions.

can you tell me do sound bars have multiple HDMI input sockets, or do I need an adapter 4 into 1. 
certainly I don’t know of a tv that will take 4 HDMI inputs

[royabrown2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Izzyeck 

Yes, there are soundbars with multiple HDMI inputs, like my old YSP-2500 which had four. But the trend these days is for even high-end soundbars, like my thousand-pounds LG GX soundbar above (not that I paid that for it, but that’s list), to have fewer, and it has only  one.

With ARC, your audio from the TV, and therefore from the HDMI inputs on it, was compromised, and only HDMI inputs directly into the soundbar or receiver could overcome this.

But nowadays, with eARC, the audio from the HDMI inputs on the TV is no longer compromised, and as it’s easier and more natural to operate your devices from the TV than from the soundbar, the HDMI inputs are ‘moving’ off the soundbars and onto the TVs.

You say you don’t know of a TV that will take four HDMI inputs; I don’t know of one that won’t, certainly on the big four makers above 32”.

And you could always use your suggestion of an HDMI switcher on a TV with less than 4, though make sure to get one with its own remote.

[Izzyeck]

Thanks again to royabrown2. I bow to your superior knowledge.

it looks like it’s not just a soundbar but also a new tv. 🤣