Lip Sync Problems

What worked for me if you are able to is do the following, although i have an lg tv.

Turn the tv sound up and the sonos sound up so you can hear an echo. Then play around with the delay options (i found the lg audio out delay was much better) until they are in sync. Once happy, turn off the tv speakers. Bingo.

the sony doesn't provide any audio out delay options. Also the problem is the audio is already late and the Sonos only allows you to make it even later.

Original Poster

In order for us to help please give us details of your system:

Playbar + do you have surrounds and/or Sub
Do you have other Play units and you are grouping them with Playbar?
Where is the audio input to Playbar coming from? - Direct from TV or Direct from BlueRay or Satellite or an HDMI splitter or optical switch?

As to delays:-

- Playbar will have around 30mS of delay on the audio signal - this is generally considered to be not noticeable but some are more sensitive than others.

- If you GROUP other Play units to your Playbar + surrounds/Sub then THEY will have an audio delay of around 70 mS so they will be out of sync with Playbar and picture (obviously)

I would like to understand the 30ms and 70ms latencies that have been mentioned on other threads before I sink more money into an HDMI switch.

I will see if I can be more clear...

The 70Ms delay you are referring to applies only to Sonos devices playing music audio when they are receiving an analogue input. For our example, let's take a device playing audio to a Play 5's 3.5m input jack. The play 5 needs to receive the analogue audio, complete an analogue to digital conversion (ADC) (not a long process) and places the data into packets that are sent along the wireless network (That inevitably will have intermittent data flow speeds that result in what is called "Packet jitter") to all players who receive the audio and play it in sync. The delay is designed into the process to ensure processing time, and mostly communication time and buffer to alleviate challenges in wifi communication. (As it is, you can quickly see from reviewing posts that a number of people who post on this community have networking systems with noise, interference, congestion, that speakers still drop audio - That is their networking challenge to resolve as the system works well with most networks.)


The PlayBar does not need to to an analogue to digital conversion as it receives digital data and plays it. The time for audio production is approximately 30ms ... a delay that should keep close enough to the video match that you should see no issues... This timing, I understand, is the same for a bonded SUB and surrounds (Because of their higher speed dedicated 5Ghz wifi)

That is why I'm wondering where your noticeable delay is occurring... The PlayBar isn't really adding much overhead.

If you were to try to get Playbar TV audio out to the rest of your Sonos system (e.g. play the audio of the hockey game in your bedroom on Play 1s while in there...) The audio in the bedroom would be behind the audio of the PlayBar. The PlayBar, when playing the audio from it's optical port, plays it at it's speed and allows the other "grouped" speakers of the system to lag behind at the pace they need to manage packet jitter occurring over the 2.4Ghz network. (This would be audio approximately at the 70ms latency described above. No problem if you are in your bedroom and can't hear the playbar... but they will not be in sync is you tried to send audio to speakers that are just "grouped" to a PlayBar.)

Hopefully that was more clear...

The bottom line here is that using the Playbar for TV sound there should be only a 30ms latency. That should not be affected by whether or not you have a Sub, nor will it be in any way improved by using a switch.

For most people a 30ms delay is completely unnoticeable, so either you are highly sensitive to this or your Playbar and TV are not playing ball with each other. I suspect the latter, and it would probably be best to submit a diagnostic and post the number back here, or call Sonos Support.

Or the audio is already significantly delayed by the source. Unfortunately, TV sources are notorious for shoddy lip sync, and if the audio is lagging, the slight 30ms delay will be extended to the point it is noticeable.

The best solution - although not cheap - will be to by-pass your Sony TV's audio and take s/pdif audio (optical or coax digital) directly from your sources to a digital audio delay product like the ones made by Alchemy2, Felston or Primare.

Alchemy's D.DaD is $499, Felston's DD740 is $249 and I think Primare's Delay Box is $399 but the Primare only has two inputs. The other two have 4 s/pdif inputs so can switch between four sources and delay the audio source selected in 1 ms increments by remote control for perfect lip-sync adjustment.

By taking the audio directly from your sources you will eliminate the audio delay Sony imposes of about 70 to 80 ms (not sure about Sony but that will be close) which will make the inherent video delay of the TV available to offset the 30 to 70 ms audio delay you are seeing from Sonos. That is, when signals arrive in-sync (which is actually extremely rare) you should find perfect lip-sync with your digital audio delay set on 40 ms if your Sonos is providing the other 30 ms audio delay and your Sony's video delay is 70 ms (or on 50 ms if your TV delay is 80 ms).

That should solve your problem plus you will find lip-sync error changes from program to program and with these devices you can align it perfectly at the touch of the remote without disturbing the image. Even TV's that offer an audio delay adjustment (like Samsung and Vizio) do it in huge increments of 10 and even 20 ms which means you will never find a spot that seems in-sync plus you have to go into menus to make a change which isn't practical in my opinion.

I use the Felston DD740 which can actually adjust in 1/3 ms increments but I find 1 ms steps to work for me. I adjust sync for every program but menus aren't feasible because you have to wait until an appropriate "target" comes along which might be 5 minutes or longer into some programs. You need a talking head with a view of the lips long enough to get feedback on your change.

When such a scene appears I focus on the lips, touch the + button a few times to judge if I am improving or making lip-sync worse and if worse reverse direction until perfect. All of these devices will adjust by hand held remote in 1 ms steps so any of them should work as well as my DD740 to correct lip-sync.

Another benefit of this connection (not using audio from the back of your TV) won't matter to you since you have a Sony but "most TV's" (like Samsung, Vizio, etc.) will deprive you of Dolby 5.1 audio from any HDMI source connected to the TV.

You have a Sony which is one of the "few" TV's to offer Dolby Pass-through which allows the TV to request Dolby 5.1 form its HDMI sources even though it doesn't have a Dolby decoder and bypass all internal audio circuitry and send it out its optical output on the rear of the TV. Of course you have to enable that setting which means you could get 5.1 out of your Sony but since Sony gives you no way to turn off the audio delay it imposes it may be academic.

My Samsung offers audio delay in its s/pdif menu but as mentioned impractical to adjust since it's in 10 ms steps and must be done via menus but at least it can be turned OFF (set to zero) so for anyone who doesn't care about Dolby 5.1 the TV's optical output could be used for input to the Sonos but it will be limited to stereo.

That's because Samsung (and most TV's) will request stereo from each of its HDMI input sources and that's all that will be in the HDMI stream. Note that using a device to extract s/pdif audio from the HDMI stream going to such a TV (most TV's) can only extract what's there and that will be stereo if connected to a TV like a Samsung that doesn't offer Dolby Pass-Through.

I overcome that limitation of my Samsung since taking audio from each source is not via HDMI and can be 5.1 even though the HDMI audio is stereo. Of course essentially all TV's can output Dolby 5.1 if received from their internal tuners -just not from their HDMI inputs - so if you use your TV's internal tuner you may want to route an optical cable from the back of the TV to an input of your delay box but note that output will unfortunately have the Sony imposed delay but you will be able to correct lip-sync on all the other inputs except the internal tuner.

I hope this helps. By the way if anybody is upset with Sonos for a 30 ms or even 70 ms delay I just heard the super expensive Devialet Phantoms delay audio over 150ms!

Couldn't you just just go from your source to a HDMI splitter like the one below cheaply that has optical out and run it to your soundbar? Not really saying this in theory as I have this set up. I have a projector set up, so I don't even have a TV output, I run my directv to my splitter and feed the optical to the soundbar via a 50 ft optical cable. I have no audio issues.

https://www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=15375&gclid=Cj0KEQiAot_FBRCqt8jVsoDKoZABEiQAqFL76FjpnqNOgc6IilrpzhIW8JweBSH87j_od98CqcjNHRsaArrA8P8HAQ

since my last post I did buy a monoprice HDMI switch and it does seem to work for this, lips are sync'd. I'm still trying to decide if its worth it to have an extra switch and have to hit the button on it to switch inputs between satelite and roku. Probably. it has an IR remote, so maybe I can program it into my sony tv remote somehow, I doubt it, but if I could that would solve the issue really... or I could get a universal remote maybe to make it all easier... Anyway, thanks..

I just picked up my set up on the 2/23 so it's all new to me. I really love being able to flip over to music when my wife puts the tv on pause. and then when she gets back, we just push plan and optical feed switches back to tv mode. very slick. also, have a sub which makes a nice diff. So very shocked how much sound/bass comes out of the play 1 speakers. it's crazy. Now if i could figure out how to trueplay set up my speakers on the beta software I would be set. But I think they have it disabled. Doesn't make sense but oh well.