Sky & Sonos

I got so frustrated with Samsung on this issue that I sold it and bought a Panasonic and had no problems since. Will never get another Samsung, they know it’s an issue but have done nothing to resolve it. 

I don’t have Samsung TV, but I do sometimes get lip sync issues on Sky live UHD feeds, eg F1

There is a technical doc here I found a while back, I think I may have posted on here before:

Sky Lip Sync

It’s not surprising sometimes there are lip sync issues in live feeds, when you consider the amount of post processing that goes on in mixing the feeds from a remote location, bouncing around satellites from wireless links on location, etc

I do have a simple no cost solution though, it works for me when I get these issues on live feeds:

Look at the eyes of the person speaking, or the face of the person they are talking to. If you can train your brain not to look at the lips, you wont ‘see’ the lip sync issue.

I really dislike lip-sync issues - it just ruins TV viewing and when I had the issue, admittedly I became quite focused on it and just had to get it sorted.

I see some may choose go for the option of switching the TV audio format to the default PCM 2.0 stereo format, which is less demanding on the TV processor. Also some older TV’s apparently (in some instances) may do better when the optical port is used for the audio output instead, albeit that means using the Optical to HDMI Sonos adapter. I still think it’s worth considering an audio splitter, as I mentioned, I use the VAX04101A with our old (2015) LG Dining Room TV and a Beam (gen2) and that works really well to provide Atmos audio output from a Nvidia Shield - I haven’t seen a lip-sync issue since.

Our main TV is also LG, and newer (2019), and that has digital audio pass-through and when that’s set, it works well (perfect) too with the Sonos Arc. So I would definitely consider adding a splitter, even a cheap one will provide 5.1 Dolby Audio for less than £/€/$50.00 and worth that small outlay if you are otherwise happy with the current TV.

I’m confident I understand your technical points, I’m just disagreeing that the evidence must point to the TV only, specifically because it’s a Samsung. I provided the link to the HT receiver thread to show there is apparently more going on over HDMI than just two uni-directional media streams, not to demonstrate how the streams are routed. If that’s the case then it opens up some other options on where the problem could lie.

OP is able to reliably repeat an audio sync problem in the same way I can (by toggling the Dolby switch in the Q box), I’m assuming he’s seeing the same lag as me, which is why I’m interested in this thread. I have seen that another dolby source does not suffer from audio lag. From memory, I believe the QN85A I was using does have audio passthrough. I’m not disputing that Samsung TVs have introduced audio lag in the past but that doesn’t mean this issue has the same cause. 

I do not know if OP is using a TV with passthrough, optical or HDMI, a base, ray, beam, arc or amp. No-one really bothered to find out before mocking him. Hopefully he’ll come back and elaborate, but would fully understand if he didn’t.

OP seemed to think this needed to be a joint effort, not necessarily a Sonos only bug fix - a collaboration to resolve the problem wherever it might be. This steers me to thinking of handshakes too. I’m not sure if swapping Sonos with another brand sound bar will resolve though, the arcana suggestion would appear to have more chance of success for less cost albeit more Heath Robinson.

Short of taking over a different brand eARC TV and/or a different brand eARC audio device there’s not much hope of isolating the problem with my family member’s Q box. Sky devices are difficult to work with as the family IT support as they are pretty much locked to an address by Sky’s T&Cs and IP geo-location (apparently, but I don’t want to find out), Q box uses a special LNB,  Sky contract are prohibitively expensive to acquire as a test device (I’m not going to sign an 18 month contract just to test this out, they can live with stereo on Sky and surround on blu-rays for now...). In fact, over the years, h/w faults in sky equipment only seem to get resolved with major new products and now we have the standalone pucks this might be a non-issue. 

Absolutely agree, I’ve seen the same on Freesat, but that’s intermittent. What I’m seeing is 100% repeatable by switching dolby on/off on the Sky Q box regardless of the content playing so am discounting the satellite effect for this particular case. I don’t remember if I tested this on just live or recorded content too, or whether that’s even a relevant test. The bigger the TV the easier it is to ignore the lip-sync using your method :)

Switch to optical out instead. Even Samsung have a hard time adding a delay to that audio route.

I’ve re-read the OP who mentions Dolby Digital Plus. Thinking on it, it seems unlikely that a blu-ray would be sending a DD+ stream, more likely DD or TrueHD. Maybe the TV introduces a lag transcoding DD+ to whatever format goes down the ARC channel, but the other DD formats don’t follow the same process. Might go some way to explaining why the Q box behaves differently to other devices and gives me some other ideas to test.

Of course, I overlooked that it might not be CPU utilisation introducing delays. Samsung could have just dropped the incoming audio stream into a 1s long buffer for some reason, possibly internal lip-sync management but are just reading out way too late. I was assuming this would behave the same for all HDMI inputs, but I see now that Q box is using DD+ and the potential different behaviour.

This would limit Atmos and TV smart app usage though? I guess Sky users would be drawn to the apps on the Q box though out of convenience which apparently don’t support Atmos anyway

I doubt this sheds any extra light, but I’ve been testing with Sky Stream pucks for the last couple of weeks. It’s easy to create a similar delay to the Q by toggling the auto/passthrough settings on the LG TV. However, the lip-sync eventually corrects itself, possibly when new programme starts. The stream puck has options for passthrough/PCM stereo/dolby digital/dolby digital+/auto, so seems a little more advanced than the Q.

Conversely, I tried puck->Denon AVR->LG A1 and the sound was consistently synchronised, albeit manually set to a 75ms delay.

Audio sync issues are low on the list of problems I’ve seen with the pucks - erratic remote control behaviour has been hampering testing (I could try to get them replaced as it seems I’m not alone). From what I can find, there’s also a lack of surround (and UHD) content on the basic streaming offering to justify the effort of stabilising DD+ for non-sports/entertainment subscribers.

Atmos would not be possible, indeed, but if the audio is out of sync that’s not useful anyway. I don’t know how it would affect app usage though.

It’s a pain, arc/earc seem somewhat hit and miss with Sky, TV as hub and not only Sonos but other manufacturers too. Sony TVs seem better than most as the middle of the chain of devices with optical giving the most reliable but at the expense of most limited audio options.

This is true.  Fundamentally this is a TV problem.  For most of the time I have had Sonos HT (which is all the time Sonos has had HT products) I have bypassed the TV for audio in some way or other as a solution to this issue.  This has been necessary with Panasonic and LG TVs that I have owned.