Question Best Way to Connect PC to TV and Sound Bar?

[M A W]

I plan on getting rid of my Xbox and just using my PC for gaming and video. TV is a Vizio E43-F1 and the soundbar is Vizio S3820w-C0. In my computer, the motherboard is a MSI B75MA-P45, GPU will eventually be GTX 1660, and there is a AudioQuest Dragonfly DAC in the USB port for audio because the mobo coax port is defective (I have no PCIe cards for audio).

The distance between my tower and TV is about 6 feet. Video seems straight forward as my original plan was to get a 10 foot HDMI cable. For the audio I would use an optical cable to connect the TV to the sound bar. But I wasn't sure if the audio could be fed this way by delivering it through HDMI and then through an optical, all while maintaining quality as much as possible. My other plan was to connect a aux cable from the USB DAC straight to the sound bar. But again, even if this would work, audio quality is also a concern. I'm sure there are other ways to go about this and am open to other options.

https://imgur.com/cDCaBHS

View: https://imgur.com/cDCaBHS

 

[Alabalcho]

If you want to use your USB DAC, you have no other option but to connect the soundbar directly to your PC. If you use HDMI audio, it will be try-and-hope-it-works - it depends on the TV.

 

[drivinfast247]

Just use the HDMI cable. You lose all benefits of the DAC once you connect it to the TV or soundbar via optical. Plus, you'll never notice the difference of audio coming out of a soundbar.

 

[M A W]

One problem I realized though is the GTX 1660 only has one HDMI port, which means that has to be used up to send the video signal to the TV; and since I don't have any other options for video ports on the TV, I can't use that for audio too unless I set it up like in the doodle I linked. I thought about getting a USB Bluetooth adapter to stream the audio to the sound bar, but I understand the audio will be compressed and have a bit of latency? I'm okay with sacrificing the benefits of the DAC if necessary, since my options seem kind of limited. As far as I can tell, my only options seems to be:

Video:
PC GPU >(HDMI)> TV

Audio:
(1) PC GPU >(HDMI)> TV >(Optical)> Sound Bar
(2) PC Bluetooth Adapter >(wireless)> Sound Bar
(3) PC DAC >(auxiliary)> Sound Bar

Unless there's a better option, I can't decide which would be superior in quality over the others, unless the differences between them are pretty negligible. Would I be better off just doing the first option and keeping it simple?