The ps4 pro still has it

Because its not coming from direct source. Your TV could never give you the same sound quality as having the optical coming strait from a PS4.

If my PS4 or Xbox one, or Wii U or 400 dollar HDR blu ray player does not have it I would never know. Why would anyone hook it to anything other than a TV or receiver only to have to keep changing it? Just hook it to your TV, unless a person does not have a TV but still has a a stereo. I guess there are someone that is in that situation. But .....hmmmmm lol People are REALLY trying to nick pick. The HDMI connection is better anyway way more data bandwidth.

yep, you need the optical if you want true surround sound. Wireless Golds for example use a USB dongle but only simulates 7.1

technically right now I do have my PS4 connected to my receiver via an optical audio port. But that's only because I upgraded my TV and it wasn't playing nice with my home theater system at first (some settings needed to be tweaked). I will leave it like this for now because my Pro does deserve the best possible sound setup, but I could as easily just go back to ARC via the HDMI now that I figured the TV out. It's how I had my PS4 and Pro set up before I got the new tv a few weeks ago.

@BVFTW - yeah, unfortunately I cannot do that currently. My Receiver is older and is only 1.4 HDMI with no 4K passthrough. So I need to connect my 4K devices directly to my TV. Eventually when I upgrade I will do that, but at the moment this is the best I can do.

At Neonridr: The best audio setup would be passing the audio directly to the reciever through the HDMI, it has more bandwith dedicated to audio than the toslink, conect it to your Audio Receiver and then, when you configure your PS4 to pass the audio through the HDMI, you'll see that it will support higher sample rates (up to 24-bit 192kHz) and "uncompressed audio" beyond two channels.

yeah, right now my PS4 is technically connected via the optical out to my receiver, but again I only did that because my new TV was having issues playing nicely with the receiver. I will test out the quality to see if there is a noticeable drop or not between the ARC via HDMI or straight optical.

@Axecution I agree with your comment mostly. I don't see it being a huge deal. I have surround sound hooked up through my TV and it still sounds amazing. So I don't see it being a problem for most people.

Your last statement "Their games aren't exactly known for their fantastic audio quite like Uncharted, Tomb Raider, etc etc."? Have you never heard the music in any Nintendo game. Their is a reason so many people love the music. Also if you have played smash bros 4, you'd see the soundtrack is Amazing. Nintendo games do have fantastic audio already.

@Uken12

of course! But there's a difference between a good soundtrack and a game having fantastic audio.

The soundtracks are golden but in terms of sound effect recording quality and multichannel effects, theres not many games on WiiU that takes advantage of all the features quite like the other consoles.
That's all i meant haha

Nintendo didn't support bitstream audio on the Wii U so I just assume the lack of Optical means they won't have it on Switch so you would have to get a more expensive converter. Might as well just get a new Speaker System. But if you are serious about Audio, Raw Audio is much better than Bit Stream. I can notice the difference on Xbox One.

I agree, uncompressed audio is the way to go! A good stereo system using Linear PCM with a high sampling rate is much better than most of the run-of-the-mill home theathers using codecs. It was a shame that the Wii U didn't supported bitstream audio thought, but that wasn't a hardware issue, I hope the switch does.

Any good surround sound headset uses optical is what he meant to say, Astros, Trittons, Turtle Beaches etc.

Astros, Turtle Beach, etc usually require Optical if they are 5.1 or 7.1 headsets.

Then there wont be an issue other than tv apps not outputting sound to the surround sound, you can just plug the hdmi into the surround sound

The receiver will support whatever it gets, if it supports the format. It's more the TV's don't pass through the full spectrum of data that it gets. Most TV's will take most DTS sources and output them in Stereo. They'll only support 5.1 through ARC if the content comes from the TV itself.

This is a copy protection thing, that requires licensing on the part of TV makers, and most don't bother. Many mid-high end range TV's can have it enabled, but it's not always easy, and sometimes impossible.