The picture is perfect. Mario is right there on the big screen, jumping around in total silence like a mime with a mortgage. Undock the console and the built-in speakers work fine, so the games clearly have audio. Dock it again and the TV has nothing to say.
That specific combination, video yes but audio no, rules out a lot. The HDMI link is alive, the dock is powered, the console is healthy. What's left is audio routing, one badly chosen surround setting, or a cable that's passing pictures while fumbling the sound. Here's the order I'd check, most likely first.
Check what's stealing the audio
Before touching a single cable, make sure the sound isn't simply going somewhere else.
- Unplug anything in the headphone jack. If headphones or a speaker cable are plugged into the console's audio jack, the TV gets nothing. Nintendo lists this as the first check for a reason.
- Disconnect Bluetooth headphones. The Switch 2 happily keeps sending audio to paired Bluetooth earbuds while docked. If someone in the house paired AirPods last week, that's your ghost. Kill the connection in System Settings.
- Check the boring TV stuff. Volume up, mute off, and confirm the TV's speaker output is set to its own speakers (or the soundbar you expect), not to an audio system that isn't on.
You'd be amazed how often it's number two. Nobody ever suspects the earbuds.
The full power cycle, done right
If nothing was hijacking the audio, clear the HDMI handshake next. A stuck handshake can negotiate video correctly and still botch the audio channel.
Hold the console's power button for about 12 seconds until it fully shuts down, not just sleeps. Unplug the dock's power cable and the HDMI cable, wait at least 30 seconds, then reconnect power first, HDMI second, console last. Quick two-second replugs don't count; the electronics need those 30 seconds to actually reset.
The surround sound trap
Here's the one that catches soundbar owners. The Switch 2 outputs surround audio only as uncompressed multichannel Linear PCM. It doesn't send Dolby Digital or DTS bitstreams at all. Plain HDMI ARC doesn't have the bandwidth for multichannel LPCM, and neither does an optical cable. So if the console is set to 5.1 surround, the dock feeds the TV a signal your ARC-connected soundbar can't receive, and the result is silence or audio that cuts in and out.
The fix is quick: in System Settings, find the TV sound output option and set it to Stereo. If sound comes back, you've found it. From there you can either live with stereo (it's fine, be honest) or move the audio path to something that can carry multichannel LPCM, meaning a TV with eARC feeding an eARC soundbar, or an AV receiver sitting between the dock and the display. Our ARC and eARC no-sound checklist covers that plumbing in detail.
Cables and the stuff in between
Still silent in stereo? Now it's physical-layer time.
- Bypass everything. Plug the dock straight into the TV, no soundbar, no receiver, no HDMI switch. If audio returns, the middleman is the problem, and you can reintroduce devices one at a time until it breaks again.
- Reseat or swap the HDMI cable. Use the cable from the Switch 2 box if you still have it. If you're shopping, ignore version numbers on listings; the badge that matters is Certified Ultra High Speed (48Gbps). A worn cable that passes 4K video but corrupts audio packets is more common than you'd think.
- Try another HDMI port on the TV. Ports fail in creative ways, and some TVs treat certain ports differently for audio features.
Update, then escalate
Grab the latest system update under System Settings, since Nintendo has shipped audio-behavior fixes in firmware before. If you've been through everything above and a different HDMI cable, a direct TV connection, and stereo output all produce nothing, test the console on a friend's dock. Sound on their dock means yours needs service. No sound anywhere means the console itself gets the repair ticket. At that point it's Nintendo support, not another settings menu, and no amount of replugging will talk you out of it.