In this case, you can see my speakers listed as “Headphones” and you can see my TV listed as “SAMSUNG.” On a more serious note, fixing the problem was pretty easy, and if you find yourself in a similar scenario as me where you want to use a speaker system for your sound instead of your TV when you’re using your Mac to play a video and are using the HDMI port to send video signals to your TV, then all you have to do is hold down the Option key while clicking on the Volume icon in the Menu Bar and you’ll find more options than just a volume slider.ĭoing this shows options for selecting an output device, as well as an input device, and if you have both an HDMI device connected, as well as headphones or speakers, you should see both of them in the output device list. After all, and as Meghan Trainor would agree… I’m all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble. Not only wasn’t this ideal, but I wanted the audio to play on my speaker system while the video played on the TV so I’d get the full effect of lows, mids, and highs from my speaker system. So what gives? – It turns out OS X is designed to automatically route all sound out of the HDMI port to the device where the video is being played, so the sound was all being handed over to the TV for the TV to handle, forcing me to use my TV remote to adjust the volume. The sound was loud coming from the TV, so I decided to try and adjust it with the volume keys on my keyboard only to find the following prompt come up when attempting to press the volume up and volume down keys: Over the weekend, I decided to sit back and watch some Star Wars movies using the new Samsung smart TV I got for Christmas, but when I connected my Mac to the TV and started to play my movie, the sound was all coming out of the TV instead of my Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 sound system despite the fact that I had the speakers plugged in via the 3.5mm headphone jack on the left side of my MacBook Pro. In this piece, we’ll walk you through how to make sure your audio out is going to the right place. On the other hand, if you wanted to use external speakers or headphones, it can cause issues if your sound settings aren’t configured just right because HDMI itself is also an audio out port in addition to video out.

It’s a great way to take in all of your favorite movies on the big screen. On the right side of all modern MacBook Pro models is an HDMI port used for digital video and sound.

Macbook pro to tv connector