Beosound Theatre – A few questions about latency

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Hello Beoworld(ers?)

Long time lurker, first time poster. As the title says, I have a couple of questions about latency in regard to the Beosound Theatre, that I hope some very knowledgeable people around here might be able to help me with.

My setup currently consists of a Theatre and two Beolab 8’s as surrounds.

Nvidia Shield and a PC both connected to the Theatre, the Theatre connected to a LG G1 via HDMI:

PC/Nvidia Shield > Theatre > TV.

I have also tried having the PC connected to the TV first (in both PC mode and regular HDMI mode):

PC > TV > Theatre.

Speakers have been connected to the Theatre both via wired Powerlink, Wisa and currently, Digital Powerlink. I assume that a wireless connection will add further latency, but since it is still noticeable when wired I decided to try the new Digital Powerlink connection.

My main question concerns latency when playing games from the PC. I would like to start off by saying that I’m aware that latency is inevitable, and I don’t expect to be able to fully eliminate it. I believe I’m quoting Geoff Martin: “You can’t avoid latency unless you have a time machine”. However, as anyone playing video games will recognise, its preferable to eliminate as much of it as possible. It’s especially noticeable in cutscene or dialog scenes, where “lip sync”, or the lack of it, will be quite distracting and lessen the experience.

I have tried playing around with settings such as using Direct instead of the Movie or Game profile and temporarily disabling the room correction (a setting I would very much like to keep enabled, since it seems to be working wonders for my room). I have also tried to force the HDMI input to use PCM instead of bitstream, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference and it turns out to be quite a bother since the TV doesn’t seem to be able to differentiate between audio settings on the Theatre’s HDMI ports, and has the setting stick for the HDMI input on the TV, rather than the HDMI input on the Theatre, forcing me to dig through the settings and swap it back to bitstream when watching movies on the Nvidia Shield.

I’m of course also aware that processing, room correction, and other factors will add latency but what I’m hoping that someone has information on is:

A: How do I mitigate/minimize it?

And B: Is there any information available on what settings add latency, and how much?

Actually, any and all information on latency and such for the Beosound Theatre will be appreciated.

I hope I’m not retreading familiar territory with these questions, I wasn’t able to find any threads about this very specific use case. If I have somehow missed an already established topic, I do apologize.

Thanks in advance, and thank you for the wealth of knowledge in this forum 😊

 

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