Will this setup work with 5.1 Surround? (1 Viewer)

[Doms]

I have a TV with no HDMI ARC and I have a Samsung HW-M450 soundbar with an option to buy rear speaker (Samsung SWA-8500S) to make it 5.1. I have read that optical cable wont be able to handle 5.1 audio and my best way is to use HDMI ARC. The Samsung HW-M450 has HDMI ARC Out and a HDMI In. My player is T95N Mini M8S pro android media player.

What I did was I connected my android media player to HDMI In of soundbar then hdmi arc out to a "regular" hdmi of my TV. There is a sound coming out of the soundbar and video coming out of the TV. Looks good. I am just not sure if I will get a surround sound when I purchase the rear speaker for my soundbar. I just want to make sure that things will work and that I dont have to buy anything else to make this work.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

HDMI delivers 5.1, so if you’re getting audio on the soundbar that’s a good thing. However, 5.1 ultimately has to come from a source component. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see anything in the Mini M8S feature list that says it supports 5.1.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Al.Anderson]

Your setup will like work just fine and is the best configuration, but a couple note for the next time - ARC only helps if both devices support is, so if your TV can support ARC it'll be able to send an audio signal back through what is normally an input path (so if you have cable going directly to your TV it'ss still play through the soundbar and not just through the TV speakers. But you usually have to enable it on your TV's settings. Optical carries 5.1 just fine; what it doesn't support is TrueHD audio, but you can probably live without that. So if you're TV doesn't support ARC, and you do have that cable going to your TV, you can use optical to get the sound to your soundbar.