sound lag on Panasonic Home Theatre toslink input/ouput?

Hoping this is a sci.electronics.repair problem: This concerns a Panasonic = SAPT760 home theatre system which has been repaired once under warranty and= suddenly new problems have appeared. (most of which I can live with but I = was wondering if anyone here recognised the symptoms).

There is an annoying half-second lag on sound output when played through th= e SAPT-760. Panasonic HT tech support said it is caused by the (Panasonic)= Plasma TV. TV Tech support at first agreed and sent me a BIOS upgrade. Th= e lag reduced to about a tenth of a second or less (this was almost definit= ely a coincidence) and has since increased back to about a half second agai= n. If I play the TV sound at the same time as the digital HT, sound, you ca= n hear the marked lag, with the TV sound being, of course lag-less.

Other problems with the HT setup which may or may not be relevant are that = when I first got it, my Nano played and charged through the built in dock. = Now it shows incompatibility which Panasonic confirms! But I am wondering = how it played and charged formerly??

More importantly perhaps, on initial turn-on, when switching to the Toslink= input, I initially get no sound whatsoever. Leaving it on digital input, = after a few minutes, I start to hear a low frequency (3-4 hertz?) popping w= hich slowly increases to about 10-15 Hz before the unit starts to recognise= the popping as the light based sound it is supposed to be decoding and the= n the sound quality is generally OK with no popping. But with that annoying= lag. All other inputs (including the DVD) are OK, which told Panasonic Tec= h support that the unit is performing properly and that the problem must be= with the signal coming out of the TV. =20

On one call, the TV people said they found some reference to an adjustable = lag on the HT system but the HT people deny that any adjustment on this (or= resetting to defaults) exists. There IS a time delay adjustment on the DVD= side but it is set to zero.

Yes I DO know that there is some millisecond adjustment on individual speak= ers but this problem concerns a general half second lag on all speakers and= all speakers seem to be set up OK on the in-built DVD system.

One last thing: The lag isn't always there: Sometimes the toslink sound (i.= e. the sound from the tv into the HT) dissolves into a generalised cracklin= g.

Reply to
Amanda Riphnykhazova
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On Fri, 7 Sep 2012 14:57:54 -0700 (PDT), Amanda Riphnykhazova wrote: (... too lazy to word wrap...)

Try turning off the Dolby digital audio when using the Toslink. Dolby can add about 0.5 seconds delay. DTS audio might have less of a delay and is worth trying. Toslink does NOT have a lip sync specification because there is no associated video channel. That might explain why Panasonic isn't very responsive to the problem. If you want tolerable (not perfect) lip sync, HDMI 1.3 and 1.4 are the only interfaces with a functional spec.

The strange noises are definitely not normal and should be investigated. However, I have no clue from where they originate.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

: JeffLiebermann

This problem has persisted now for 6-8 months with differing degrees of int= ensity but since I posted, the digital sound first disappeared completely, = then the next day came back when I turned off the Dolby (and without any re= al noticeable lag) and then today the lag came back with such a vengeance t= hat I thought that the HT unit had defaulted back to Dolby (no, it hadn't).

Reply to
Amanda Riphnykhazova

I never thought about this before.

Does that mean that any old surround sound-ish system could in theory have audio horribly lagged and off from the video from the source such a DVD?

I've noticed there are delay settings on most audio decodes but, I've not noticed or though about there being sync issues with the audio as a whole.

MiniDV was another story, and a complete waste of my time when I used it.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

I don't know. I've never tried surround sound on a DVD video playback, mostly because all my boxes are ordinary stereo. No 5.1 anywhere. Theoretically, the lip sync could be a problem because there are no specs. The bulk of the delay is not in the audio system. It's in the video processing. Some detail:

Incidentally, my DirecTV R16/300 composite video is noticeably out of sync with the audio. However, the component video output is fairly close. My guess(tm) is that DTV optimized it for component video assuming that nobody will be using composite video. The R16/300 doesn't have HDMI.

The only ones that I've seen that are close use HDMI 1.3.

I missed that one.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I'm still living in the past with a 1998 sony DVP S500D DVD player and some sort of equally old Technics sourround sound decoder. They connect with some sort of toslink-ish fiber optic cable, and pretty much work with anything but the movie Hellraiser 2.

I just added WD Live media player box to the museum of 1990s home thatre and it mostly works with the same surround sound decoder, but will freeze things up requiring a reboot from time to time. I've not noticed audio sync problems, and I watch video over component video or svideo with the DVD player and HDMI to a projector with the WD live box. I've never used audio over HDMI, and have no idea where you'd even intercept the audio signals and listen to them in the first place.

crappy videotape format with unsynced audio and video streams on the same tape. Audio could and would drift from the video if you played the tapes back on a computer, but from the analog ports on a player, they were always OK.

I'm still trying to figure out how that was even possible, but it was, and the non-consumer DV tape formats never had that problem as they had some sort of time sync info between the streams.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

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