In my office, I have two computer monitors, a Benq 4K and a Lenovo 1920×1080. The Benq is my day to day screen and is set to 2560×1440. The next definition makes the text too small to read.
The Lenovo is for my turbo trainer and is used to display a virtual world when I’m on the bike.
I feed them both from the same Mac mini.
The problem I have is how best to supply video to the monitors which will, of course, depend on what I’m doing.
The simplest solution, or so I thought, would be to use two HDMI outputs from the Mac and use an extended desktop. Works okay IF I’ve got both monitors powered up and on. If one is off (most usually the Lenovo) some apps can open on the (dark) monitor and it’s difficult to get. it back to my main screen.
An easy way out would be do get a decent HDMI switcher to manually go between the two monitors. I’d bought a switch some time ago to switch between two inputs (Mac and Raspberry Pi) and the one output, namely, my monitor. Apparently these switches are bi-directional so I tried this with my current setup. It didn’t work. The Benq would only display upto about 1920×1800.
As it was quite old, I splashed out on another which was advertised as 4K 60Hz. Unfortunately, this didn’t perform any better.
I resolved myself to manually swapping the monitor leads over.
Skip forward a bit to last weekend when I was rearranging the office and I resurrected an old Denon AV receiver. I fed the HDMI from the Mac into one of the 4K ports on the receiver and took the monitor output to my Benq. That worked okay.
I was thinking today that maybe the Denon re-constitutes the HDMI signal making it slightly different in some way to the native Apple signal.
I put my new 4K switch into the HDMI between amp and Benq. I was able to display unto 4K (but only at 24Hz) or my usual 2560×1440.
I plugged the other switch outlet into the Lenovo.
Surprisingly, the switch works enabling me to alternate between the two screens.
Just out of interest, I tried my original switcher and that works just the same.
As an added bonus, I can plug another device (Nintendo Switch or Raspberry Pi into any of the other HDMI inputs on the amp and switch both inputs and output. Plus some nice sounds.
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