What does the A/V Sync Setting do?

[DBworcs]

Hi all - two quick questions:

- What does the A/V Sync Setting do on Android TVs? The options for me are on, off or auto. My set up is just an external soundbar linked by HDMI ARC. It's not a Sony A/V sync compatible soundbar or linked via Bluetooth, so should I leave A/V Sync off?

- Does ClearAudio+ only work through the TV's speakers and not on external HDMI-linked speakers?

Many thanks for your expertise. 

[merseyswine]

The A/V sync setting allows the TV to control the soundbar. So when you turn on the TV it will automatically turn on/off the soundbar, except for the odd time when it doesn’t. And you can use the TV remote to adjust the soundbar volume (most of the time). It’s modern firmware, so it’s not totally reliable, in my experience. Sometimes, usually when my wife or some other non-technical person is using it, the soundbar fails to come on and so there is no audio, other than my wife hollering to me that the TV is broken again.

[royabrown2]

@merseyswine  That is BraviaSync, not A/V Sync.

BraviaSync is Sony’s name for their particular flavour of CEC, and its various ways of chaining husbands to 24/7 tech support duty.

A/V Sync is for when the audio on an external device leads or lags the video on the TV, and you need to correct this.

@DBworcs  Read this, and then come back with any further questions:-

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/articles/00026069

Regarding any setting, such as Clear Audio+, where you are not sure if it is applied before or after the take-off for HDMI audio, get the TV working with the external audio device, and then try to go to the setting in question. If you can’t get there, or you can but it is grayed out, this tells you the setting is for internal speaker operation only.

In general, though, the audio is passed ‘as is’, on the grounds that the external device has its own settings you can use for this, and also, you don’t want the possibility of two lots of the same enhancement being over-applied.

[merseyswine]

Oops! ....I’ll get me coat.

[DBworcs]

Thanks @royabrown2. I've disabled ClearAUdio+ now.

With A/V Sync, I'm still not sure whether the feature will work with my Q Acoustics M2 soundbase as there seems to be only a very few soundbars compatible with this feature listed here by Sony here:

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/articles/00198863

[royabrown2 · Accepted solution]

@DBworcs 

Pretty certain it wouldn’t - I think you have just explained why this isn’t the time setting I would expect, as Auto must need the device on the other end to have the smarts to negotiate the exact time delay needed.

Still doesn’t explain what On does, though.

I suspect from Sony’s documentation that these sets put the audio out on ARC in sync with the video, so any delay in the soundbase is for the soundbase to deal with. Which it can’t, of course, or it would. So actually you need set a video delay on the TV, to match the limitations of the soundbase.

But the A/V Sync can’t do that, It seems. Or maybe it delays the video by a fixed, largish, amount, so you can delay the sound on the soundbar by a variable amount to bring it back into sync?

I don’t have these devices to play with, though, so I can’t try anything out.