I’m streaming music through a Sonos Amp, wired to two JBL floor standing speakers and paired with a Sonos Move. The Move plays in the same room alongside the standing speakers. The Move is a nice ‘sound filler’ for the big speakers and can then be moved to another location such as outside, when required. When streaming music the floor speakers and Move are perfectly synchronised but when my Samsung TV is the source of input (via HDMI ARC, TV to Amp) the floor speakers and Move are slightly non synchronised, creating an ‘echo’ effect, or an exaggerated spatially separated sound. The Move appears to be fractionally delayed behind the floor speakers. The TV sound quality is poor unless I turn off the Move and take it out of the equation.
How to explain and correct the de-synchronised audio when TV is the source?
The difference is the buffering the Sonos system needs to do to prepare the digital input from the HDMI to play across grouped rooms. This delay is generally accepted to be somewhere around 70 to 75 ms, and sometimes more, depending on some settings. You’re not getting that delay when streaming music, because it’s already built in to the stream, so that Sonos can synchronize all ‘rooms’. Unfortunately, the nature of the HDMI input from the TV requires different handling. In that case, to support the synchronization of the video and audio, Sonos doesn’t buffer for the room that the TV is in, but as soon as you ‘group’ other rooms, it needs to buffer for all the other rooms.
Thank you for that great explanation. Now I know what I will do; buy a dedicated TV sound-bar and separate out and keep the hifi for what I really intended it for, streaming music!
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