Delay compensation when used with AV receivers

One of my zone players (a ZP90) is connected to my suround sound AV receiver so in party mode I can play music through the surround sound system in the sitting room. However due to the signal processing carried out by AV receivers the sound lags by about 250-500ms that produced by the ZP120's. The delay makes it not possible to use it durring a party as the delay between the zones makes listening unpleasurable. I would like to be able to configure all the other ZP's to always have a delay of Xms (or even better to only have the delay when linked with any other zones). Which would enable the music to synchronise with the ZP90 in the Sitting room.

Hi I made the following feature request but it disapeared so I try again...

One of my zone players (a ZP90) is connected to my suround sound AV receiver so in party mode I can play music through the surround sound system in the sitting room. However due to the signal processing carried out by AV receivers the sound lags by about 250-500ms that produced by the ZP120's. The delay makes it not possible to use it durring a party as the delay between the zones makes listening unpleasurable. I would like to be able to configure all the other ZP's to always have a delay of Xms (or even better to only have the delay when linked with any other zones). Which would enable the music to synchronise with the ZP90 in the Sitting room.

+1

Really important and should be easy to implement on the software side?

I have the same issue too. I'd like to see a software configurable delay in each zoneplayer. Sonos seems to work very nicely with analogue equipment, but as soon as any equipment with digital processing is introduced, there is unacceptable delay.

I have read one or two comments in the forum regarding this, but here is my official feature request for it, and the reasoning why:

I currently have 5 zones at home, 2 S5's, 2 ZP90 and 1 ZP120.

One of the ZP90s is connected coax out into the living room AV receiver, the other zones are spread out across the place. For a long time I've enjoyed distributed music in perfect synch around the house, much to the amazement of my friends at parties.

I recently upgraded the AV receiver (from H/K AVR 354 to Yamaha RX-A3000) and find that the new one introduces a noticeable delay, around 30 ms from what I can tell. This is in the shortest, "purest" setting!

Now, as you can imagine, all the other zones play in synch but the main living room zone is about half a beat behind. And since it plays the loudest, it has ruined the experience completely.

I believe this will happen to others as well the moment they combine systems and use more advanced configs which introduce delay inherently in the processing.

So my feature request is:
Introduce a delay function for specific zones in order to manually compensate for secondary processing delays.

This could be a simple 1-100 ms setting in each ZP configuration. Or inversely specifying how much of a delay a specific zone introduces and have the others compensate whenever that zone is in a group with the others.

I believe the ZPs are already buffering internally in order to synchronize playout, so this should in theory be possible.

Thanks!

In all honesty, this is why I'll never buy a Kenwood receiver. They sound great, but they over do the DSP nonsense, and defaulting to a delay such as this is all part of that obsession with DSP's.

Bleh, the A3000 was at the top of my short list too :(

Back to the drawing board I guess.

Bleh, the A3000 was at the top of my short list too :(

Back to the drawing board I guess.

If I can help with the drawing, I've had great experiences with both Onkyo and Denon, and neither brand has a delay (or at least they have a "Direct" override mode).

[Mod note: This is a recurring topic in Sound Ideas. Six threads have been merged.]

[Mod note: This is a recurring topic in Sound Ideas. Six threads have been merged.]

Thanks for combining these. I also found a bunch of comments about it, but wanted to reiterate that it's an important feature request, especially as more and more people integrate their Sonos players into AV receivers combined with multiple zones.

Up to 100-150ms is more than enough for almost all cases, which uncompressed is only about 1-2 MB or so. I'm pretty sure the Sonos hardware can already buffer that much (or more) audio and with the advanced multi zone synch functions already inherent in Sonos it should be possible to implement this as a software update.

I think a "this zone delays: ___ ms" setting specific for a particular zone would be the most flexible method as it allows negotiation between the zones when grouping, including other zones which might also have processing delay of some kind.

All in all this problem has pretty much disabled my multi zone setup for now.

Thanks!

-- Rune

(As for the direct audio route, in the case of the RX-A3000 the "pure direct" mode disables speaker biamping and subwoofer so is pretty much useless to my config. In any case it doesn't completely eliminate delay!)