I’ll start by saying, never have I enjoyed listening to music as much as I have on my Atom connected to Dynaudio S40’s. Been running this setup for 4+ years now and every day it brings a smile to my face.
That said, for every smile it brings to my face, a frown is there to back it up when trying to watch TV through the HDMI ARC port. As mentioned in numerous other forum posts and brought up over-and-over again, the HDMI functionality (that I paid extra to have installed after the fact) has been inoperable since the Uniti Firmware update back in March 2021. It worked perfectly before this for more than a year!
We’re now 1.5 years later and still no fix in sight for those of us with LG OLED’s from 2019 or later, that’s not to mention the countless Sony and Samsung TV owners also voicing their frustrations.
Before anyone here tells me to “try the ol’restart and check your connections” steps, let me say that I’ve done every single step and combination of steps to try and get it to work. The ONLY way I can force the HDMI input to recognize the signal from my TV is to go into the HDMI Input Settings via the Naim App (iOS) and then switch the CEC behaviour from one of the three selections to another…this seemingly forces the Atom to recognize the signal and it starts working. Not exactly a great solution, and only marginally better than dealing with optical…since once the signal is recognized, at lease I can use a single remote. If the devs know that this particular workaround works, how hard can it possibly be to have it work as it should?
I’ve been promised time-and-time again from Naim support that a fix was incoming, even that they hired an “expert” in HDMI certification/protocols to help fix the issue.
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Naim’s Software team is either terrible at their jobs, or woefully short staffed…either way, they should remove the HDMI Compatibility from all of their marketing pages until they’re ready with a legitimate fix.
I understand that HMDI ARC is a garbage, non-standardized protocol that makes this difficult, but I’d venture to say that there are now more TV’s on the market that don’t work with the Atom than ones that actually do. And I can again confirm, that my TV works perfectly fine with other HDMI ARC enabled speakers/amps…tested on friend’s Sonos ARC, Seinheiser Ambeo Soundbar, NAD M10 Integrated Streamer, and Yamaha Receiver…all work flawlessly so no, this is not an LG TV problem…it is a Naim problem.
Enough exciuses Naim, either promise a fix and timeline, or remove the false advertising saying that the Uniti line of products has functionality that it doesn’t.