Stop listing HDMI Compatibility on Uniti Products

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.

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Did you try the digital (optical) output on your tv to the naim.

You can’t control the volume from that. You need two remotes. The whole point of the ARC connection is that watching TV just needs a single remote/app.

You can use a third party learning remote though it isn’t elegant. I do that with a pre-ARC soundbar. The volume buttons are programmed to the soundbar and the others to the TV. But it’s a horrible clunky thing.

I own a Uniti Nova connected via HDMI to an LG OLED C1 and never experienced any HDMI issue.
I can control the volume with the LG remote and the volume changes on the amplifier. Everything works brilliantly. Except for the iOS 16 upnp bug that takes 15 min. to recognize my NAS.

I have an Atom connected over HDMI to an LG G1 and I typically use the LG RCU to control the Atom volume.
It wouldn’t neccessarily direct all your frustration towards Naim alone, have you raised this with LG support directly for example, have you tried different HDMI cables even.
If it was just down to poor software development on Naim’s part, you’d expect all Uniti owners to be up in arms but that isn’t the case here, it is frustrating but I would expect the root cause to be far more likely to be the TV than the Atom so worth looking at this from all angles.

I even paid extra for an HDMI input on my Atom, back when it was just an option. With hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered. I finally gave up on it after a spurious signal from the TV sent the Atom into meltdown, pumping some very weird distortion into the speakers and turning the display into garbage.

Mr. M, you are one of the very few people I have heard from that hasn’t run into the issue as I’ve described above…I’m honestly jealous and wish I wasn’t in the situation I’m in…that said, there are numerous cases of people both in this thread, and countless other threads who have had the same issue. I can 100% confirm that it is a Naim issue…they have 1. Admitted to it, and 2. the HDMI ARC port worked flawlessly before the 1.8 Software update. Again, there were no changes to the TV Firmware or software during this time.

Couldn’t agree more ChrisSU! I feel exactly the same way and would have not bothered had I known this was going to be the case. Ignorance is bliss. If it didn’t work from the get-go, I would be much more likely to accept the limitation, run audio over optical, and resign myself to using two separate remotes.

But the fact it worked perfectly for almost a year before Naim dropped the ball is the most frustrating part, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to expect more from their software team in fixing it.

Sounds like you’ve thought this one through, I know my LG TV’s have had numerous system software updates in the time I’ve had them, the main lounge TV I’ve not had that long.
I would say I have done full factory resets on the TV after system software updates (even though you don’t have to nor is it suggested/recommended by the TV UI) and that tends to keep things happy even though you have to set it all up again like a new TV, it’s usually worth it. I’ve done the same on the Atom as well after any software updates.

To be fair I think Naim have put quite a bit of effort into fixing this. They tend to try to do things by the book when working with standard protocols like HDMI, but problems arise when the big TV brands try to customise their own version of HDMI, and sometimes release automatic updates without warning. This leaves Naim chasing multiple issues from different TV brands. I believe they even had an ex-Samsung employee working for them on this at one stage.

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