AW3225QF, eARC audio issues, Investigation

Just spent 5 hours or so of frustration to do Dell's engineering work for them. I hope my emails reach the engineering team, but I'm posting here for visibility.

I recently bought an Alienware AW3223QF QD-OLED monitor and it's a huge visual step up from my old Dell G3223Q IPS monitor, but that one had a 3.5mm jack and the Alienware has HDMI eARC. No problem, right? I just got a $20 eARC extractor/DAC and it should keep my speakers working great. Well, no. The monitor doesn't show up as an audio device on any PC I tried.

However, I plugged in a PS4 and a Nintendo Switch to the HDMI input and eARC audio worked fine, so the AW3223QF is doing *something* right? I tried Linux, I tried Windows, I tried an NVIDIA RTX 3080, an AMD Radeon 7800XT, and the Intel iGPU in my i7 14700K. Nothing detected the audio.

I called Dell tech support and spent an hour and a half on a call, let the guy remote into my PC, tried a handful of different HDMI cables. He said "it works on the PS4, so the monitor is fine".

I said no, obviously something is up with the AW3223QF otherwise the PC would see it as an audio device. My old G3223Q did, my Samsung TV did, it has to be this monitor. I updated the AW3223QF firmware. For an $850 monitor I expect it to work.

He eventually relented and contacted his "engineering contact" but basically they just said the same thing.  Console works, thus AW3223QF fine. We eventually ended the call with no resolution, but the tech said he'd report it to engineering.

After getting off the call, I remembered EDID dumping and edidreader, so I dumped the HDMI EDIDs from my Samsung TV (audio works, including the eARC extractor) and from my AW3223QF. Compared them with edidreader. The Samsung TV EDID had an Audio Data Block describing supported formats and speaker configurations, but the AW3223QF EDID did not. After some unsuccessful fiddling trying to patch the ADB into the AW3223QF EDID, I tried an easier hack. I just forced the RTX 3080's HDMI port to use the dumped Samsung TV EDID with a kernel command line, rebooted the PC with the AW3223QF plugged into the HDMI port. Lo and behold, audio through eARC works fine if the PC thinks it's a Samsung TV. I then tried dumping the DisplayPort EDID from my G3223Q (as the Samsung TV did not do DisplayPort) and using that EDID override on the RTX 3080's DisplayPort. Plugged the AW3223QF in, and audio still works fine if it thinks its a G3223Q.

So yeah, it seems the issue does lie in the AW3223QF, specifically it's missing information in its EDID. Dell, if you're reading this, please add an Audio Data Block to the AW3223QF EDID based on the capabilities of the detected eARC device (basically what audio formats it supports) and maybe have an option to force enable audio passthrough for at least basic stereo modes because it seems whatever it currently does is lacking.