Hi All, hoping to get some advice on how to proceed and fix some ongoing audio sync annoyances...
The setup I have presently is a ~2017 era Samsung Smart TV, connected via optical out to an older A/V receiver (no HDMI ports on receiver) driving a 5.1 speaker set. Used to quite happily use the Samsung Tizen TV with all it's apps for things, but over time it became flakey and unreliable (apps crashing\freezing, not updated, limited availability of apps etc.). So I purchased a Fire TV 4k stick and connect to HDMI on the TV. Firetv remote is programmed to control the receiver via infrared and works for power on\off and volume control.
While the Fire TV itself works better than the TV OS, I'm now having inconsistent audio syncing issues. Various apps and content will be offset by different amounts. E.g. Netflix vs Disney+ so even if I configure an audio offset so it is in syncfor one show, when watching something else it will be off again. Seems like this could be a FireTV issue as there's various many threads out there about similar issues. Or it could be due to format support\conversion and it not liking the optical setup (which I don't believe supports a lot of formats like DTS or Atmos etc.). I've tried just about every possible software configuration and settings suggested to resolve this and cannot get it to work consistently\reliably.
It would still be nice to retain the ability to output audio from the TV itself (e.g. The Tizen apps\Freeview), as well as other HDMI inputs (e.g. Playstation). Should also be simple enough to use in general that whole household can drive it without hassle (wife test) so TV and volume control with a single remote (not possible now with the TV OS volume\remote not able to change volume via optical).
I'd like to hear suggestions on how to best proceed.
Options I was thinking about:
- Bite the bullet and just spend the $$$ to buy a modern receiver that supports proper HDMI and current audio formats etc. and setup as either passthrough or with Arc (money is tight).
- Try my luck purchasing a different TV stick e.g. Chromecast with Google TV, hope audio issues are actually a FireTV issue.
- Try order a HDMI Audio Extractor and use that to deal with the audio via optical out, hope audio issues are actually hdmi->optical issue. Downside is annoying to switch inputs and no sound to receiver from TV.
- Something else, open to suggestions....
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
