You Asked: Is the Theater Quad worth an upgrade?

Welcome to the latest instalment of You Asked (a show produced every week with your online submissions about movies and technology): can the successor to the Bravia Theater improve upon the HT-A9 if you are already bought in? Have we seen any substantial progressive refinements with regards to OLED in the last couple of years? How do TV remote controls become the master of your other devices today? And what can you do to get your system’s audio sync under control?

What’s Causing My Tv Audio To Be Out Of Sync? | Sony HT-A9 Or Sony Bravia Theater Quad? | You Asked Ep. 51

Upgrading to the Theater Quad?

Salama writes: Is the Bravia Theatre Quad worth upgrading to from the HT-A9?

For context, Salama has fought a problem with sound dropouts – which has, for the most part, been solvced by switching the HT-A9’s wireless setting from prioritising higher-resolution Premium Sound to explicitly favouring a rock-solid SIMPLINK connection.

I bring this up because I think there are only two reasons to upgrade from the older HT-A9 to the Theater Quad: one, if you really dig the look of the new flat speakers, and would enjoy the slightly simpler placement and generally lower-profile look, mounted on a wall or otherwise; and the other is if you’re suffering from audio-dropout issues.

And I don’t think I stress-test the Theater Quad enough to be able to vouch that it will work flawlessly in every single person’s home or retail setup, but Sony’s changes and enhancements to the wireless audio signal are so dramatic that I feel like I can say with some confidence that you’d do pretty well to get out from under those wireless audio dropouts, at least for the most part – especially if you happen to upgrade.

But a much cheaper fix would be to find the source of the interference with the audio drop-outs and see if you can mitigate that. If your Wi-Fi router is close to your system and it would not adversely affect other things if you moved it? Try that. If you can move the little processing box so it has an unobstructed line of site to the speakers, try that.

Granted, the interference might not be something under your control. If so, the new system is probably the way to go. It’s just a very expensive way to go. Then again, you might not need to finance it with the sale of your HT-A9 after all.

Oh, and acoustic centre sync is almost certainly not going to do the trick. Since you can adjust the height of the speakers on poles, which can be adjusted for altitude, you’re probably not thereby taking anything away from the HT-A9.

LG C4? Or the LG G4?

Jimmy, from Belgium, writes: After some nine years of service and 30,000-plus hours of hard usage, I have some slight burn-in on my LG EF9500 OLED. I’m thinking about either the LG C4 or G4 and was wondering what I am missing out on if I don’t pick one up with a new 4K Blu-ray player that supports Dolby Vision?

Okay, this one’s easy, Jimmy. You’re looking at a massive upgrade with an LG C4 or an LG G4. Sure, your current OLED is still an OLED, so you’ve experience what contrast OLED can deliver. However, the increased contrast you can get out of a modern OLED TV – thanks to not only white brightness but also colour brightness – is definitely noticable and a significant treat. More than that, your current EF9500 was among the first TVs to get HDR, and processing for HDR alone has come leaps and bounds since then. You’ll observe much better HDR performance but picture quality in general is going to be better since LG’s deep-learning image processing has come a very long, very far way in just a few years.

And the Dolby Vision version of the HDR content you’re watching — sometimes it’s better. Sometimes it isn’t, you know? Sometimes it’s less desirable than a standard HDR 10 or HDR 10+. It depends on what you’re watching. And Dolby Vision could potentially look so much better, so good. At best. But, you know, it’s a tool. How good the picture looks when using Dolby Vision is up to the artist being able to operate it.

I seriously doubt you’ll think you’re missing anything from the picture quality loss, and you get the true benefit of Dolby Vision on disc, worlds ahead of everything Blu-ray. Now, if it’s strictly budget then, yeah, if you absolutely want a super-modern disc player given that it includes Disney’s streaming movies, and you want Dolby Vision, get the LG C4 and a new player (or a fairly good used one) rather than blowing everything on just a G4.

Whither the cable box

Chris Renteria writes:

I have a Samsung S95B you recommended 15 months ago … The picture quality has been fabulous. I never could get my Spectrum DVR cable box to work with Samsung’s One Remote. Any chance you could suggest a workaround? Or maybe I should junk this and just pull the DVR plug on everything and go with YouTube TV. I get the same thing (haven’t yet had an opportunity to record games) and it’s all there on the TV app. Cinch Shafer: I’ve never had a hoop that so thoroughly skewered an innocent bystander in such a brazen, public fashion.

I suspect plenty of people run into this problem, especially those of us who grew up spending weekends programming our remotes with a series of button codes.

Many modern TVs ship with a corny-looking wattled remote that actually includes an IR emitter — but the newer units use IR purely for the most basic of power-on/off functions. Not that Bluetooth uses IR, either. Although the signal gets from the remote to the TV through the air, the commands from the remote are digital and are coded and un-coded using Bluetooth wireless technology between the remote and the TV. New ‘smart’ remotes aren’t programmable and cannot control other IR gear.

Normally, that is how your TV remote will be controlling your TV over HDMI, via a protocol known as HDMI CEC, or Consumer Electronics Control. CEC is a mess. It’s flaky as hell. But it’s what we’ve usually got.

To get your TV remote to control your cable box or Blu-ray player when it doesn’t already, make sure that HDMI CEC is enabled in the cable box or Blu-ray player, or whatever. In some cases, the manufacturer will use a different name; sometimes the button is right there on the screen. CEC On, or CEC Off.

The challenge is to find that setting and flick the switch. It could also be that your box is so antiquated this feature is not available, in which case the solution is – no surprise – to replace that box with a newer box from your cable or satellite company.

I’ll simply add that most modern TVs have among its initial ‘wizards’ a setup item checking for other devices – presumably, ones connected to the TV via HDMI CEC (and you need HDMI CEC turned on in your boxes for this to work correctly.) That will often cause the TV to automatically label the box as some kind of device – so HDMI 2 might suddenly become ‘Blu-ray’, or ‘Xbox’, or ‘cable’, and your remote will start controlling many of the control codes associated with that device – without you doing all the work!

The perils of audio sync

Nick Hanninen writes:

With your help, I finally installed my 83-inch Samsung S90C and I love the gargantuan viewing experience (although my roommate and I are waiting on the flood of dimensions from the local furniture store). I can’t really watch movies with the built-in speakers so I connected 5.1 audio via TOSLINK to an older receiver. For some reason I can’t get the audio timing to fall into place. It’s like someone has the foot pedal on the railroad crossing signal and I can’t stand to see dialogue out of sync. There’s an option for delay in the TV’s settings, but I have no idea if I’ve got it dialed in just right. I’m wondering if I should bring in a pro audio calibrator to see if they can fix this. Is there any help you can render in this situation?

I’ll be upfront here: audio sync is one of those troubleshooting chores that’s highly dependent of what kind of gear you are using, and how it’s all connected into your entertainment system. What I can say is that the digital audio processing most of these devices engage in has a very tight relationship to the video signal in many soundbars and receivers such that you can’t use the regular adjustments provided in your set to fully correct for a potential audio/video sync issue, and the delay in the audio device is often there to delay the audio so it lines up with the video signal being handed off to the TV through that same audio device. So, it’s not uncommon to cycle through these sync/delay choices and end up with worse sync rather than better.

You might have to look deep into your TV’s audio settings if you are offloading audio from the TV to a receiver or soundbar via HDMI ARC or optical: telling the TV to convert the audio to PCM, which forces the use of an onboard audio decoder provided by the TV, can helps to address the delay. This tends to work especially well when you send only a stereo signal down to a stereo soundbar, but it also sometimes works when you send a 5.1 signal if the TV can do the decoding.

You might also, as a troubleshooting measure, put your TV into passthrough mode (Dolby Digital passthrough, DTS passthrough) rather than direct mode (Dolby Digital direct, DTS direct) if using eARC.

I don’t claim that this advice will work universally for two reasons. One is that there are simply too many permutations of the settings. Another is that this is in no way rocket surgery. You probably aren’t going to hire a pro audio calibrator to make adjustments such as those described. Someone who is a pro audio calibrator would be hired to optimise the audio of an advanced audio system. Trying to have them do work such as fixing out of sync is like trying to hire a structural engineer to replace one of the boards on your deck.