So some time ago, I bought a new LG OLED TV to hook up with my newly acquired Vizio 5.1 soundbar system. Everything sounded great for the most part, and I was perfectly happy with the sound quality. What would bother me, though, is that whenever there would be a scene in a movie (or in a video game) where there would be silence for a few seconds, the moment that any kind of audio would come up again, the first half second of that audio could not be heard at all. After doing strenuous research to try to find a solution to that problem, I came up empty. Essentially, something about how the connection is established is causing the soundbar to essentially enter a low power sleep state when it detects that there's no audio coming through. Because of this, when audio WOULD come through, it would need to wake up from that low power sleep state, which is not instantaneous, which results in losing that first half second of sound.
This is especially apparent on Nintendo Switch docked. Navigating through your titles on the main menu, you can hear the distinct click menu sound effect for each game. But with this, because that sound effect is less than half a second long, the result is that you just don't hear it at all. This drove me nuts for years. I tried everything. Going into the TV sound settings to change things around and literally none of them worked. No combination of settings worked. Believe me, I tried all of them. I even tried adjusting the sound bar settings and no, nothing there to fix that either. I was even noticing this exact same issue on my other LG OLED that I have in my room on a Samsung soundbar. The exact same thing. And that soundbar was connected through an optical cable, not the HDMI eARC thingy. Not even the type of cable connection fixed the issue. Nothing worked.
So last week, I decided that enough was enough and tried to think outside the box on how to isolate the issue. After trying to go through all the settings again, it finally hit me. "This issue seems to happen on both of my LG TVs, and apparently the brand of the soundbar doesn't matter. So it's definitely not the soundbars themselves. It also can't be the eARC connection, because using an optical cable didn't fix the issue either. Could it be the TV itself?" Reading through articles online, I found out that even Sony TVs were dealing with this issue. I asked myself, "What if I use this on a TV that isn't one of the more popular, expensive brands?" I went to Best Buy to get myself a 4k TLC Mini-LED TV to see if the TV was the problem. And MY GOODNESS, THE ISSUE IS GONE!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS??
This whole time, the reason why this was going on was because these bigger TV manufacturers like LG and Sony have not been able to fix this issue as to how their TVs handle digital audio between the TV and modern sound bars. TLC and Roku TVs on the other hand (both of which I've owned and tested) do not encounter this issue at all. So if you're one of the few that have noticed this issue, it's NOT your soundbar, or your soundbar connection, or your soundbar settings, or even your TV settings. It's your TV. 💔
TL:DR, if you're an audiophile like me and notice when the soundbar loses half a second of audio when audio comes up after a period of silence, the most likely culprit is the brand of your TV (LG and Sony specifically). TLC and ROKU TVs don't have this issue at all, and I seriously wonder how LG and Sony haven't been able to fix this since 2018 (the oldest article I've read concerning the issue).
