@JtR1888
No call for any of that 😢
Can we get back to looking at this objectively?
An ARC or eARC HDMI input should be a superset of any other HDMI input, just adding the (e)ARC capability, but not losing anything else.
In fact, it should be the very best HDMI input, or at least as good as any, as it has to be able to handle anything that a very capable AVR can provide, at least up to the maximum capabilities of the TV.
And @Mchaggis69 has already gone the second mile by dropping the AVR out of the equation, as good diagnostic practice demands.
So there shouldn’t be anything that works satisfactorily in HDMI 1 or 2, but not in HDMI 3, and if there is something, like this Android Shield, that works OK in 1 or 2, but sparkles in 3, then the TV is faulty in some way (hopefully only in fixable software) and using 1 or 2 to get over this is a workaround.
@Mchaggis69 is though, not restricted to having to use Optical for audio out; were he to use HDMI 1 or 2, the audio for any device connected to these ports can perfectly well go out over (e)ARC. And this would make using 1 or 2 as a workaround for now less inconvenient.
But he is quite right to say this is just a workaround; and Sony need to fix whatever is going wrong with HDMI 3 as an input here.
Apropos of which, the mechanism of the failure seems to be pretty clear; factory reset the TV, or maybe just hard reset it, and the software on the ARC input works OK; later, it goes wrong. Which indicates that one or more variables are being corrupted or mis-set as the software runs, and this survives, causing the input to persistently misbehave until a further reset.
That this only happens on the ARC input, apparently, may help to narrow down Sony’s search for the problem.
My favourite bedtime reading is a Sony product manual…
