My sister and her husband bought a "smart" sound bar. Theoretically it only needs an audio hookup. It does some type of HDMI passthrough, I think it is called "

My sister and her husband bought a "smart" sound bar. Theoretically it only needs an audio hookup. It does some type of HDMI passthrough, I think it is called "ARC". It has a WiFi connection but they never hooked it up. After about 3 hours of use, it would have to be powercycled or the audio would constantly cut in and out. My dad looked at it & he decided to connect it to WiFi to check for a manufacturer firmware update. There was no update. However, this fixed the issue entirely. The problem never happened again. A literal wired speaker, requires a WiFi connection to work properly.