B50 with Nvidia shield and TV

Bluetooth Products B50
1

I’ve recently purchased the B50 to act as an ARC amp for some book shelf speakers. Pretty much a sound bar setup.

My TV is an older LG from 2014, it has an ARC output.

I’m experiencing iffy CEC behaviour, but it’s really tough to work out where the issue lies.
I want to use the shield remote to control everything.

Anyone else running a shield plus B50 setup?

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Did you end up getting this working? I’m looking at doing a similar setup with LG C9 + Nvidia Shield 2019 + Arylic B50. What specific CEC issues are you experiencing?

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Im pretty sure my TV is the problem, but I don’t know if its a LG thing in general, or just the age of my TV.

Power on/off: Using the shield remote via bluetooth (default behavior) with CEC just doesn’t work for my TV. The shield turns off but the amp and tv remain on.

Vol control: Using shield remote via bluetooth with CEC doesn’t work, unless I force HDCP 1.4 in the shield developer options. This is the main reason why I suspect its the TV.

If I tell the shield remote to use IR for power on/off then I can control my TV, which in turn triggers the amp to turn off*.

*The amp won’t turn off if it ever receives a cec volume request. I don’t know why.
If I request power on/off a few times back to back then it eventually gets the message and actually turns off.

The amp always turns on correctly, after a 5s delay, so that good at least.

My best guess is that the tv doesn’t respect cec commands from the shield. Commands originating from the TV via IR appear to work though. Ie: the TV wants to be the CEC master device.

PS: I’ve read many posts on reddit where people have CEC issues with their brand new, expensive, LG C2/C3 OLED tvs. It seems that LG have some CEC challenges.

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Is your Nvidia Shield able to control the internal LG TV speaker audio via CEC? I can’t get that to work correctly on my LG C9 and have to rely on IR controls. As such, I suspect all LG TVs will have issues with the B50. Sucks. :frowning:

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I’ve not tried to control the TVs speaker via shield driven CEC, but I suspect you can get it work if you force HDCP 1.4 in the shields developer settings.

I’ll try test it tonight and get back to you.

Found this, may help you?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShieldAndroidTV/comments/gu6s6e/shield_tv_pro_2019_lg_c9_oled_hdmicec_volume_not/

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I ended up getting the Arylic B50 and fortunately both HDMI CEC volume control and standby work out of the box with my LG C9 and Nvidia Shield remote without any special configuration. B50 on my HDMI ARC port, Nvidia Shield on another non HDMI ARC port. TV set to output HDMI ARC as PCM with Simplink enabled. HDMI-CEC and Volume control enabled in the Shield settings. No developer options enabled. Phew!

Quick question: did you notice any audio crackling or artifacts during your testing? I swear I’m hitting an inconsistent crackling in audio or video playback that I can’t consistently reproduce.

Related: how did you configure these audio options in your Nvidia Shield?

  • Available formats
    This should be none/no surround I think to force stereo down mixing
  • Stereo upmix
    Not useful for the B50
  • Dolby audio processing
    I think we should enable this for compatibility because the B50 doesn’t support DD+?
  • Play comfort noise on HDMI
    User choice, maybe helpful to keep hardware responsive when waking up from standby?
  • Match Dolby/PCM audio levels
    User choice, will lower volume but make volume consistent across apps?
  • Match content audio resolution
    User choice, helpful for some music streaming apps with different encoding?
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No crackling that I’ve noticed.

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Yup, same story here. Nvidia Shield → HDMI 2 in TV > Philips 49PUS6561/12 → HDMI 3 in TV > B50. There are either cracking noises or random jumps in volume level during volume change (tested with 57 software). Those noises are not happening in BT mode, no matter if I change volume, song etc.

@joia @zpl1025 this is the issue I mentioned in other thread.

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I returned the acrylic b50 and got the new WiiM Amp and it works perfectly with HDMI arc and my Nvidia shield. No crackling.

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I’ve also got a Shield with a B50 and speakers, I can’t get the B50’s HDMI ARC audio working. Is there a way to control audio from B50 with the Shield controller while the TV’s out is optical? The shield can control the TV audio on the TV’s speakers, but not on the external speakers currently.

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Hi Rebel, would you like to test with a new firmware? I don’t have a shield on hand and we improved the ARC part a bit indeed, so your help would be quick and straight.

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I do not use the optical output so not sure about that one. Currently when I turn on my shield the B50 automatically turns on all.
I recall having to fiddle with various CEC and remote IR settings on the shield to make it work though.

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Hi, sure, happy to try new firmware. I really want to get the HDMI to work. I’m out of town this week but this weekend I can install new firmware if you’ve got something to try.

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If I can get it to work on HDMI, I should be good, the Shield is currently controlling the TV and the Arylic would be connected to the TV via HDMI ARC, which should do volume control all through the Shield remote. I tried to find Arylic in the Shield’s CEC settings, but it’s not one of the listed brands.

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Hey @zpl1025 I’m home and able to try new firmware if you could give me a file to try and instructions on how to update. Current version is 54-cf9b19fb-8. Thanks for the help.

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Hi Rebel,

I hope you know how to upgrade, and this is the beta firmware, and if you found any issues, please let me know. You could mail me frank@arylic.com, to avoid misleading others :slight_smile:

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@zpl1025
I was having trouble with ARC (Philips TV + Fire TV Stick 4K Max) but v58 seems to be working better. I will keep testing.

edit: ignore, still doesn’t work. Back to optical and using two remotes.