You switch the television on, and the soundbar wakes within a second. The console stirs from its sleep, the Blu-ray player shows its menu, and you have touched nothing but one remote. Then at night the TV goes off, and the soundbar sometimes stays awake until morning.
None of this is a fault. It is a signal travelling silently down the HDMI cable, and half of the feature behind it is often switched off without anyone realising.
A control channel runs inside the HDMI cable
The cable linking your devices does not just carry picture and sound. It also carries commands, in both directions, between everything plugged in. The feature has a name almost nobody knows: HDMI-CEC, short for Consumer Electronics Control. It lets one device switch the others on and off and control their volume through the same cable that carries the picture.
The commands it carries are power on, power off, volume up and down, and mute. The catch is that every manufacturer rebrands the feature, so a settings menu can enable it without ever printing the letters HDMI-CEC:
- Samsung: Anynet+ (HDMI-CEC)
- Sony: BRAVIA Sync
- LG: SIMPLINK
- Philips: EasyLink
Four names, one standard. If you have never found the setting, you were probably searching for the wrong name.
Why they wake up, and why they stay awake
The feature is really two independent halves, and that split is where the trouble starts. The first is auto power on: the television lights up when you wake a connected device. The second is auto device off: the connected kit shuts down when you switch the television off.
When that second half is disabled on either side of the cable, the soundbar never receives the order to switch off, so it simply stays on all night.
That has a direct consequence for your bill. A device left running is not in standby: it is switched on, and the ecodesign limits that cap standby power no longer apply to it.
What the kit under your TV costs over a year
Ecodesign rules cap household devices at 0.5 W in standard standby and 2 W in networked standby, the mode that keeps a soundbar, console or set-top box reachable at all times. Take a cluster of four devices, each sitting correctly at 2 W, plugged in for all 8,760 hours of the year. That is 70 kWh, or about £18 at the current price cap rate of 26.11p per kilowatt-hour. The benchmark is worth memorising: every watt left drawing around the clock costs about £2.29 a year.
One badly set link doubles the bill, and a single device is enough. A games console on instant-on draws around 12 W continuously, £27 a year on its own. Put your own figures into the calculator below to price up whatever sits under your screen, or check what the television itself uses while you are at it.
The settings, TV side and device side
The function is active on both ends of the cable, and cutting it on one side is enough to stop the handshake. Work through it in this order and you avoid switching off more than you need to:
- Find the feature's name on your television. On a Samsung: Settings, All Settings, General & Privacy, External Device Manager, then Anynet+ (HDMI-CEC). On a Sony: Settings, Channels & Inputs, External inputs, BRAVIA Sync settings.
- Only turn off the half causing the problem. Keep auto device off, the half that shuts everything down with the TV. Disable auto power on only if your screen keeps lighting up by itself.
- Then change the setting on the offending device. Soundbar, amp, console and streaming box all carry the same option in their menus, under HDMI-CEC or HDMI Control. Turn it off on the one causing trouble, not on the whole chain.
The trade-off is real, and you pay for it in convenience. Without the command, the TV remote no longer drives anything else. The soundbar remote comes back to the coffee table for volume, the console's controller for playback. Three remotes on the table is the price of avoiding the eighteen pounds or so a stuck device adds, so most homes are better off fixing the one bad link.
The biggest saving is still the switched extension lead
No setting brings standby down to zero. Only one thing does: cutting the power to the whole cluster. A switched extension lead behind the TV stand turns off the television, soundbar, player and console with one flick of a switch, and pairs nicely with the wider habits in our guide to saving electricity at home.
There is one caveat, and it matters. Some devices need to stay reachable:
- The set-top box: it fetches updates and its programme guide overnight, and a scheduled recording dies with the socket.
- The broadband router: it often carries the landline and sometimes an alarm, so it belongs on a separate, permanent socket.
Everything else under the screen can go dark at midnight without complaint. Your soundbar will forgive you by morning.