Its hard to explain, so I made shitty pictures in paint to try and diagram everything.
My living room has a Sony XBR65X850E connected to a Denon AVR-S730H. I bought a Toshiba 43LF621C19 (advertised as 4k UHD, so both TV's do 4k UHD, there shouldnt be any hardware conflicts from default settings) for my room. My consoles are connect to a HDMI splitter (I think its this one, theres no model number on it, and it looks similar to this), which connects to the receiver, to my tv. My living room and bedroom are one wall apart (yay small condo), so I want to use a HDMI cable to run from the HDMI splitter to that TV so I can game from my bed at night. I dont want to run it through the receiver, because then it will output sound to the speakers in my living room. The only problem is, it doesnt work, and I'm having problems finding out who the culprit is.
This is how it is currently set up, it works fine for my living room, no issues here.
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This is what I want to do with a secondary HDMI cable. The splitter sits on my receiver so it has easy access to swap cables around. For some reason, it does not work. If I get a signal, which most of the time it reports "no signal", its choppy and cuts out frequently.
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I've run this type of connection with multiple cables ruling out the following as culprits:
my HDMI cables are not faulty.
my HDMI switch is not faulty.
The receiver should not modify the connection in any way by boosting the signal or anything (this is false, see below)
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So I'm left with the TV being faulty...thats not the case either. If I run this connection straight from my PS4 Pro to the TV, the connection is stable and I have no issues.
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Just to eliminate every possibility, I just tried this and got a stable connection: consoles > hdmi switch > receiver > bedroom TV. Picture is coming up crystal clear on my bedroom TV, but the sound is coming through my speakers in my living room, which I obviously dont want, and I dont want to rip through my receivers settings to passthrough the audio. It would be faster to just swap the HDMI plug on my consoles.
I'm guessing its the cheap HDMI splitter, which is messing up the HDMI handshake between my Toshiba TV and the consoles. For some reason, it does not mess up the HDMI handshake to the Sony, and when going through the Denon to the Toshiba, it stabilizes the handshadke somehow? I cant really think of anything else.
Anyone more versed in electronics have any insight on this?