Some users have reported that ports 2 and 4 on the Hue Sync Box have more bandwidth than ports 1 and 3. Have you tried just using ports 2 and 4?

Yeah read that too - will be plugging the PS5 into port 2 or 4.

Anyway, tried it earlier to no avail, thanks for the thought tho.

Just spoken with some very nice people at Sonos who are still looking into this, and talked me through some additional testing

In short, connecting the ARC over optical appears to resolve the issue, but thats not ideal as this is a current model TV that supports eARC (LG OLED65C14LB)

Looks like the problem is somewhere with that connection but hard to pin down if its the TV, the Hue box, or the ARC

As a follow on - been chatting with “Philips Hue” over facebook chat. They suggested to move the syncbox+sonos further apart which does appear to have helped.

Need to do some more testing after work, but fingers crossed. Although im puzzled why that only impacts it over eARC and not Optical

eARC is an electronic carrier, so subject to interference by other electrical fields. Optical is, of course, optical, and significantly less subject to interference, unless you gave a rather large gravitational source, say, the size of the sun, or larger, near your cable. Which might be devastating to lots of other things, not just the light carried in the cable.

Thanks for making me smile :)

Have to admit, I was grinning while writing it, too :)

But the point is valid. eARC can be more “sensitive” than optical. A lot depends on the quality of the shielding on the HDMI cable, of course, but still. 

Yeah, but with optical its still a HDMI cable all the way to the TV where you use the supplied adapter to convert it to optical - so in my mind its still 90% the same.

Anyway - i watched some futurama and played PS5 for 30 minutes, and the light effect looked steady, never lagged or stalled  So pretty sure its due to how close the sync box was to the arc (around 30cm on the same shelf) now its twice that with a wooden shelf between the two, and the sync box is much closer to the gradient strip.

Fingers crossed it remains stable, but im hopeful it will now.

Ah. When I used optical, I used the optical cable connected to the TV’s optical connection, and ran that to my PLAYBAR. If I’d done so with my Arc, the “HDMI” part of that would only be the last 10 inches or so, however long that adapter is. The optical would be the “long” part of that chain. 

So, the problem returned today and wow was it bad. Moved the sync box as far away as I could but still get the lights lag and freeze

Gone back to optical for now and resuming chats with Philips Hue - but its weird this ONLY happens when connecting the Sonos > eARC - when the Sonos is powered off, or using optical its all fine.