HDMI eARC Sound Quality

After using my Node Icon for a few days now, I have questions about its HDMI eARC port. Most of the time, I use an NVIDIA Shield TV and Plex to watch movies stored on a NAS. My current TV is a 2017 model Sony with an HDMI ARC port, not an eARC port.

When I stream a movie with TrueHD 7.1 audio, that audio signal is transcoded into something called TrueHD-Opus. In contrast, when I stream a movie playing DTS-HD MA 7.1 audio, transcoding does not occur. Plex reports that Direct Play is occurring. For fun, I put a 4K disk using TrueHD Stereo in my Oppo 4K player, but couldn’t tell whether something like transcoding was occurring.

My goal is to build a good 2.1 home theater system in the near future. To that end, I’d like to know where the HDMI-related problem lies. Is the HDMI ARC port in my TV causing the audio transcoding to occur, or is the HDMI eARC port in the Node Icon causing the audio transcoding to occur? Put differently, if my next TV has an HDMI eARC port that can decode both TrueHD and DTS-HD MA audio, will the HDMI eARC port in the Node Icon prevent the Node Icon from playing a lossless soundtrack in 2-channel stereo? Is there a way I can tell what type of audio the Nano Icon is playing? Thank you.

HDMI eARC Sound Quality

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