Turn the TV on 5 seconds earlier? 

Haha good thought. But the Beam and tv don’t turn on at same time. Beam is always on. So I can’t turn the TV on 5 seconds after the Beam

I wasn’t being entirely facetious. Five seconds is not that much in the grand scheme of things.

Beam is always powered, but it’s in a low power standby state when idle. There needs to be a fair bit of handshaking over the HDMI to get components talking to one another correctly. After the HDMI handshakes, Beam can then autostart the TV stream. Beam also mutes the volume when it autostarts, then ramps the volume to the required value.

So then how would I start the beam first before starting the TV creating that 5 second delay?

Well, you could try manually starting TV playback on the Beam using the Sonos app, but I’m not sure it would make a whole lot of difference. 

By the way how do you know it’s not your TV which accounts for some part of the delay? 

And how come 5 seconds is such a big deal, for two pieces of complex electronics to figure out how to talk to one another and come to life? 

I think it probably is the TV. Was just wondering if anyone came across this and if there was a way to avoid it. Don’t think anyone said it was a huge deal. 

Hi

It’s normal for the Beam and Arc to have a delay after turning on the TV. I have 3 LG’s and a Sony and a slight delay with the audio occurs on all. It’d due to the handshake over HDMI ARC and/or eARC. With the old Playbar and PlayBase the delay was not present as the sound went over optical which is basically a direct transmission.

Thanks for this. I was mostly just wondering if it was normal behavior I was seeing. I went back and checked and my delay is  almost a full 10 seconds actually. Is that what you see?  I guess any differences here could also be dependent on the TV speed and HDMI cord. 

The HDMI cord would only make a difference if it was defective and causing intermittent data loss, which is pretty unlikely.

I can’t offer comparative information to AjTrek1 as I have an HDFury Arcana, which involves its own handshaking in multiple directions. I use external sources -- set-top box, Amazon Fire, etc -- exclusively. What I can say is that both audio and video come and go once or twice as the whole assembly gets up and running. It is however a lot quicker to start than a tube-based CRT television...

HDMI is a mess. The copyright holders want to guarantee that you cannot copy anything. As soon as an HDMI connection is activated, both ends of the connection are checked for compliance. This can get messy if there are multiple components in the chain, such as a switchbox or Arcana. Then there is EDID the negotiation where each box checks the other box in an attempt to find compatible audio and video formats, This also gets messy if there are multiple boxes in the chain. And, there is the CEC negotiation that allows one box to ask another to power up and select the correct input. CEC is a serial bus running at the stunning speed of 417 bps (yes, that’s four hundred seventeen!). It’s a miracle that anything works and if something does not work, it’s always the other guys fault.