Given the talk on cables with the TV and my own posts, I have one more to make. At this point, I have ruled out the TV as being the culprit of any signaling issues, but this information probably will help others.
I had been running 2 x 45' Monoprice Cabernet from my AV7702mkII to the TV. I have consistently had problems. Black screens, white pixel snow, ARC never working realiably for bitstream, and so on. My 3-year-old can sightread the phrase "No Signal" on the TV... One cable would handshake well, but had the snow. The other would handshake terribly if at all.
The odd thing was always that if I took the same cables direct from a source, they worked OK. Just out of the preamp they didn't. I took the preamp into the service center this summer and they said it checked out OK. They changed the logic board anyway to be sure. Same behavior though.
I tried the 40' Celerity fiber optic cable. That thing just was terrible. Hardly could handshake, even source direct to TV.
For reference, my sources are TiVo Bolt, Roku Ultra, K8500, Xbox One S, PS4 Pro, and PC.
So I bought 5 x 40' Monoprice Cabernet. Hoping with that volume I'd have a winner, and being 5' shorter, the signaling might be better. I installed them yesterday.
Cable 1: Handshake was OK. Massive amounts of white snow. Much more than the 45' cable. ARC worked terribly.
Cable 2: Couldn't hardly handshake at all, just no signal.
So then I called Marantz support. In the talk, they suggested I bring the preamp up to the TV and try other cables. So I did. I brought up the Roku Ultra (which had been getting the pixel snow when set to HDR mode) and the preamp. I connected the Roku to the preamp with a 3' Monoprice High Speed Certified cable. Preamp to TV with a 6' same model cable.
It worked stably and realiably. I had never seen a device handshake so quickly and stably at 4k and high bandwidth output. No snow at all. Then I tried ARC. Obviously my amps/speakers were not connected, but the front panel of the Marantz properly showed every codec for each movie I tried. It was locking onto every ARC signal without fault.
OK, so preamp verified. Long cables are in fact the problem, at least in terms of the devices working together. So I went and tried the other 3 cables.
Cable 3: Decent handshake. Medium amount of snow. ARC gave audio with fairly frequent drop-outs.
Cable 4: Moderate handshake. Very light amount of snow, almost none. ARC worked even better. Not 100%, but close.
Cable 5: Fast handshake. No snow at all. ARC is silent.
What we have here is cable lottery. I really didn't expect that. So I'm out ARC, but at least I have a working cable. I'm tempted to go back and retry them and see if I get the same results, but I'm scared to upset the stability.
Two things to mention:
- When I mention testing ARC, I'm testing bitstream from VUDU for 5.1, 7.1 and Atmos DD+ soundtracks via casting.
- When I mention white pixel snow, it's white pixel artifacts that only happen on high bandwidth signals (4:2:2 12-bit UHD or 4:4:4 8-bit UHD). Low bandwidth, even 4:2:0 10-bit UHD, has not shown pixel snow on any cable. It's the Roku, PS4, and PC that get the snow. The K8500 and Xbox One keep their output lower bandwidth.
If I could do my system over, I would never do a long run. I will never put sources devices more than a 20' cable run away from a display ever again.
For now, I can ride it out with this one working cable and hope it doesn't change. My next thing was to try external 4x2 or 8x8 matrix switches and see if they avoid the artifacts produced using the Marantz. That or look into more expensive cables to experiment with or perhaps drop a HD Fury in there (I think that unit boosts output on regular cables for longer runs).
