Monday April 8, 2019; 2:39 PM EDT
Just set up a new receiver. They keep changing these things. Once I had the speakers hooked up, I turned it on and it says INITIAL SETUP ON TV. I had no idea what it meant. So I sat down and thought. Hmm. Try hooking up an HDMI cable to the receiver's HDMI-out connection and into one of the HDMI ports on the TV. Reboot the receiver. Voila. There's a cheesy setup screen. I go through the first few pages, give it access to the net (probably a bad idea, even though I told it not to send data about me back to Japan). Then we got to ARC. I have no idea what this is. It said Your TV does not support ARC. I couldn't believe it because I have a new 4K highly recommended TV. Looked at their docs, which are better than the receiver's. I learn ARC lets HDMI flow sound back, out of the TV into the receiver. Ahhh. No need for the optical cable I bought (glad, because it was hard to get it working with the TV). Once I told the TV I didn't have a subwoofer, the sound became incredible, I guess because it started sending the low notes to the big speakers I have. I will of course eventually get a subwoofer and rear speakers. But right now I'm glad I figured out what a receiver is in 2019. Very different from the receivers of my youth.#