Hi Def television has been around for several years now and we all seem to love it.
With all the wonderful technology available, would it really be so hard for the picture to be synchronized with the sound? I’ve had several receivers from Direct TV and they’ve all been a bit off–kind of like watching an old Kung Fu movie. Couldn’t they add some sort of manual adjustment? Or is it the TV’s fault?
This isn’t normal operation. You don’t have enough information to conclude if the audio sync issue is the receiver, the TV, or the audio receiver. A “manual adjustment” would require the ability to buffer video data somewhere to delay it, and since there’s gigabytes of data per second, this would require some very expensive hardware. So it isn’t feasible.
You can find out which component is the problem by using alternatives. Connect a computer, a dvd player, anything that can produce an AV signal to the TV. Is the issue still present? Try it without the audio receiver. Try another TV. Isolate the problem to the component causing it.
To be clear: Most people don’t have this problem.
I have Verizon FiOS. When I connected my rig with an HDMI cable from the FiOS box to the TV, and also an audio feed from the FiOS box to my Bose sound system, things were out of sync. I reconnected so that the TV audio-out fed into the sound system and everything is in sync.
What components do you have and how are they connected?
Check for an audio delay setting in all the components of your setup.
Also check if your TV has a “game mode” or similar, that does less pre-processing on the signal to improve (decrease) audio latency.
My Sharp TV has a “Lip Sync” adjustment in the audio options. For some reason the problem occurs mostly on STTNG on BBC America; other BBCA shows are OK.
Almost always the problem is that the video is delayed due to additional processing - compression, decompression, re-sampling, and it gets behind the audio. So it is trivial to delay the audio with a quite small buffer to match. Where you get in trouble is that the different sources you have may have different delays, and so you need to tweak the delay on a per-source basis. This can be a very annoying problem when the source has passed though a lot of stages - like a satellite linked sports event.
As noted, many TVs and home theatre receivers have a lip-sync delay adjust. There are also reasonably cheap stand-alone devices that do it as well.
If for some reason the audio was behind the video it would be messier, as the delay buffer would need to be bigger and run faster, but not to the point that it would be a serious problem. But so far there has been no need. (A few megabytes would probably suffice, but it would need to run at HDMI data rates, and getting involved in the HDMI chain is a mess.)
You should unplug your tv for 30 sec then replug it in. HD tvs occasionally will have hardware issues, such as capacitors going bad which will display symptoms such as you are describing.