Soundbar not detecting 5.1

[waterhouse]

My TV is connected to my Samsung HW-Q990B soundbar through ARC I tried connecting my MacBook to my soundbar but it’s not playing as 5.1 and no sound coming through the rear channels. Is there some kind of settings I need to turn on? (I’m using the M1 Pro MacBook)

[NC_Bullseye]

@waterhouse

I tried connecting my MacBook to my soundbar

How are you connecting it? Airplay? Thunderbolt adapter? etc?

[JarvisMeier]

You’ll need to output regular 5.1 as ARC doesn’t support uncompressed 5.1 PCM audio.

[waterhouse]

Connecting it using HDMI the MacBook has a HDMI port

[waterhouse]

How do I do that?

[JarvisMeier]

Try here: Outputting 5.1 Channel Surround Sound fro… - Apple Community

If this doesn’t work you might be limited to 2.0 through ARC

[Needsometonic]

try doing a channel test from AAC Multichannel Playback Test
if it doesn’t play right let me know i will take a look into it. if you are directly connecting hdmi to soundbar from mac then it will only work in hdmi port not arc.

[waterhouse]

I’ll try this when I get back.

[james]

Audio passthrough isn’t officially supported on macOS yet, but you can follow this thread for updates.

Audio passthrough on Mac

There was a question raised last year about audio pass through for the macOS version of Infuse whilst still in beta. I could see that James had responded “TBD” in November, but no updates since and that topic was closed. So the question is: has anyone tried doing an audio pass through from the mac? Ideally, the mac should hand the audio bitstream to the AV receiver which would do the decoding into all the available formats, inc. DTS flavours, DD+ and Atmos correctly. If it works, then I am l…

[webfrasse]

Wouldn’t it be better to get an Apple TV and run infuse on it and stream the files from your laptop if that’s you only storage. That’s how use Infuse and my Sonos system (Arc, Sub and two One as back channels).