

Couple that with any other processing you’re doing-like motion smoothing on your TV, or “virtual surround”-type features on the soundbar-and you’re basically guaranteed out-of-sync dialogue.

If the TV doesn’t know exactly how long your soundbar will take, it may send the video before the soundbar has finished, leading to a disastrous mismatch of the mouths on screen. But when you introduce another product, like a soundbar, your TV might decode the video while your soundbar decodes the audio. If you’re playing that audio on your TV’s speakers, your TV is doing all the unpacking, so it can hold off on sending both the video and audio until the process has finished. We’re talking milliseconds, usually, but time nonetheless-and higher bitrate formats (like multi-channel Dolby Atmos) might take longer than a low-bitrate stereo track, leading to a more noticeable delay. When that signal is sent to your TV or soundbar, the device has to decode the audio in order to play it over your speakers, and that process takes time. Specifically, when you watch a Blu-ray or stream a movie on Netflix, that audio is encoded in a certain format-like DTS or Dolby Digital. There are so many different audio formats and your TV has to do a lot to unpack it all. However, if your TV does not have an Audio Sync feature or a built-in 'audio delay' or 'lip-sync' setting that you can use to minimize the delay, then there is not much you can do about the delay. It will be labeled as HDMI ARC if you TV has an HDMI ARC port. YOu did not specify if the HDMI on your TV is an HDMI ARC port or not. Lip-sync functionality was introduced in HDMI 1.3 to ensure that audio stays perfectly matched to video. There is no audio delay through HDMI ARC. As we previously explained, if your TV has an HDMI ARC port, you can connect that to the HDMI ARC port on the Soundbar (labeled as (TV ARC)/HDMI Out.
