Version 2.0, 16 September 2026. Retain the original 20 selected 2025-model-year US 65-inch televisions (nine Samsung, eight LG, three Sony). Add five TCL and five Hisense models from the same model-year/market/size class. This is a purposive catalogue sample, not a complete population of five manufacturers, an all-HDTV sample or a market-share estimator. The intended complete-catalogue expansion was not achieved: unresolved manufacturer coverage prevents that description. Keep all 30 selected rows, including failures, rather than publishing only accessible specifications.
Exact-model manufacturer specifications or model-covering quick-start diagrams are preferred. Manufacturer PDFs hosted by retailers/manual mirrors retain that provenance; a mirror's generic autogenerated description is not evidence. For U8QG, PCMag's original hands-on review supplies the rear-port inventory. For the two Samsung negatives, retain the original manufacturer omission plus RTINGS' explicit family-level absence statement. Reserp did not physically test any TV. Confidence in a family-level negative is distinct from a manufacturer statement about an exact model.
TCL QM5K, QM6K, QM8K and QM9K quick-start guides explicitly identify optical and HDMI eARC/ARC connectors. QM7K has a numerical optical-output specification. Hisense U65QF and QD7QF scanned guides were OCR-transcribed and checked for the 65-inch model labels and relevant connector diagrams. No inference from optical-related menu descriptions in a generic manual. Capture hashes and page/section locators appear in observations.csv.
65U75QG and 65QD6QF are unresolved for both ports. The US product pages did not expose usable port specifications; a Canadian QD6QF page, older Amazon-platform specifications, snippets, unverified secondary tables and generic manuals were not used as substitutes. Failed retrieval is not absence. Numerical counts are 26 optical yes, two optical no, two unresolved; eARC yes in all 28 resolved rows. The optical count would be between 26 and 28 of these 30 if the two unresolved rows were determined, but this bound is not a market interval or statistical confidence interval.
Optical presence does not establish connector shape, simultaneous-output operation, supported surround formats or equivalence to eARC. A 2025 model-year label is not a claim that the product remains on sale at collection time. The previous 2024–25 comparison is retained separately in the historical research package, not silently joined to this 2025-only sample.
Version 3.0 relates the model audit to RTINGS' public observation that U8000F and Q7F are among the few mainstream 2025 TVs without optical audio. This supports the qualitative prevalence discussion, not a statistically representative 26/30 market estimate. The statement was verified in the web reader's Input Specifications section; the direct HTTP capture exposed incomplete content and is not treated as a full source copy.