If you haven’t heard already, PS4 HDR is the next big thing in visual display standards. In fact, the focus on HDR is so strong that Sony couldn’t stop talking about it during its recent New York City PlayStation Meeting where the electronics giant unveiled their new, 4K and HDR capable PS4 console, the PS4 Pro (codenamed PS4 Neo).
Essentially HDR allows a degree of colour depth that you don’t normally see in non-HDR presentations. In addition to a deeper gradient of colours, HDR also organically brightens and darkens the picture accordingly; showcasing brilliant whites and deep darks that reveal a tremendous amount of detail that you would normally be missed by the human eye.
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Tons of developers and publishers have put their weight behind the HDR standard too, with the likes of Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4, Mass Effect: Andromeda and many more besides all getting updates to HDR.
If like me then, you’ve plonked a pre-order down for the souped-up PS4 Pro, or, intend to hang on to your newly HDR compliant PS4 but have a 4K HDR compatible TV that is piped through a wrinkled AV receiver that doesn’t support HDR, you’re probably panicking a little bit. As it happens, help is here in the form of this little tidbit that could save you a lot of grief, and, more importantly, a whole lot of money too.
Does my TV support HDR?
Before we get started though, the first thing to do is check whether or not your TV can support HDR in the first place, otherwise this will all be for nought and there will be tears; so very many tears. Only available on TVs that can boast HDMI 2.0a ports (the ‘a’ is extremely important here as that denotes compliance to HDR – HDMI 2.0 just supports regular 4K otherwise), those that have been manufactured from 2015 onwards are generally a safe bet, though to be sure, it’s well worth typing your model number into that Google thing and finding out your specs for confirmation.
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Now that we’ve identified your 4K TV is HDR compliant but your aging AV unit isn’t (again, it’s always worth checking the great Google oracle to be sure), the magic can begin.
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Separating the streams
Essentially how we’re going to get HDR visuals on your TV screen and still keep your surround sound intact is by separating the visual and audio streams. We’ll achieve this by connecting your PS4/PS4 Pro directly to your TV and then connecting your AV unit to your TV, via an ARC-HDMI port.
ARC stands for ‘Audio Return Channel’ and does pretty much what it says on the tin, as it splits the audio stream from the visual stream and sends only the audio from the device (in this case the PS4/PS4 Pro) to your AV unit. The upshot of this is that only the audio ends up going through the AV unit and not the visuals, since the latter will be going through your lovely HDR-compliant TV instead.
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The majority of AV receivers manufactured over the last three to four years typically include a HDMI-ARC connection, and when it comes to hooking it all up, you want to make sure that you’re using HDMI 2.0a cables too, simply because any earlier standard cable will not carry the HDR signal.
Once your cabling is all in order, you then want to enable HDMI-CEC in both your TV and your AV receiver as this will allow your AV unit to stream audio from your TV, without taking the video stream along for the ride too. Naturally, implementation of HDMI-CEC will vary between the various brands of TVs and AV units so give your user manuals a flick through so you know how to access it.
After you’ve paired your AV unit to your TV in HDMI-CEC mode, you then want to set your AV unit to receive from ‘TV’ (rather than BD, DVD or whatever other preset you have). Once you’ve done all of this, turn on your PS4/PS4 Pro and you should now have all that 4K HDR goodness going through your nice expensive TV without any degradation, while your surround sound audio is pumped through your surround sound speaker setup.
For reference: A 55 inch Samsung JS8000 4K HDR TV was used alongside a Sony STR-DN1040 AV receiver unit.
A big thanks to PlayStation fan @pheonnexx who helped out greatly with the technical content of this article.