This soundbar feature can be useful, but not everyone needs it
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If you’re in the market for one of the best soundbars, then there’s a feature you might have come across already called HDMI passthrough, available in some soundbars that connect over HDMI ARC and HDMI eARC.
HDMI passthrough allows you to plug a source device, such as a games console or streaming stick, directly into your soundbar over HDMI, and the video will then be passed onto your TV.
It’s a useful feature because when a soundbar connects to your TV over HDMI, you obviously can't connect anything else to it over that port — and it's not uncommon these days to have more HDMI devices than you have open ports.
This means that HDMI passthrough gives you more flexibility about how all of your home entertainment tech works together, since you don't 'lose' the use of the HDMI port your soundbar is connected to — and some soundbars even have multiple HDMI inputs, so you actually gain ports.
You won’t find HDMI passthrough on every soundbar. And that’s okay, not everyone needs it — but it might be a factor in your buying decision, if it seems like it'll be useful to you.
This guide should help you better understand what HDMI passthrough is, how it works and if you really need it.
To be clear, we’re talking here about how HDMI passthrough works on a soundbar. You might hear the term passthrough in other contexts. You also might see this referred to by some brands as just soundbar passthrough or video passthrough.
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It might not be referred to as 'passthrough' at all, but it might just be mentioned that a soundbar has an HDMI input as well as an HDMI ARC connection — in this case, the HDMI ARC connection is the part that goes to the TV (here's our HDMI ARC explainer) and the HDMI input is the port you use for the extra device.
In a typical setup, you might expect to connect a source device, like a games console or Blu-ray player, directly to your TV. The TV then receives the video and audio, then sends the audio to the soundbar.
But, if your soundbar has HDMI passthrough, you can connect the source device directly to the soundbar, then connect the soundbar to the TV.
The soundbar takes the audio and plays it through its speakers, while passing the video through to the TV without losing video resolution. This can have some specific advantages outside of just meaning that you get an extra HDMI port, which we'll come to later.
In this soundbar context, HDMI passthrough describes the route the video takes. The source connects to the soundbar, and the soundbar passes the video on to the TV.
