It's been a rough few weeks for many Sony Bravia TV owners – but a solution to their problems may finally be in sight.
Back in June, Sony pushed a software update to its current lineup of TVs that, for many, seems to have caused fundamental problems with eARC.
The issues include Dolby Vision content refusing to play, sound gradually desyncing, and audio dropouts, with most users experiencing some but not others. I’m a Bravia 8 II owner, and it’s the audio dropouts that I got.
The common factor is that it only affects content being played from an external source that is being routed through the TV to an external sound system.
For most people, including me, it has meant having to stop using their system as intended – I’ve been unable to use my Apple TV 4K, for example – and while the Dolby Vision problems were seemingly fixed by a further software update last month, the audio problems have remained.
Sony has been frustratingly quiet about the whole issue, with the only public acknowledgement coming from Sony Japan just last week.
Once translated, that Sony Japan post states that “the issue of audio being out of sync with the video (lip-sync discrepancy) will be addressed in a software update scheduled for September 2026”.
It's worth noting that Sony Japan's statement specifically refers to the lip-sync issue; it doesn't explicitly say that the audio dropout problems experienced by some owners will also be addressed by the same update.
But, in fact, it seems that the software update referenced may already be available – at least in some regions.
Software update 114.603.100.1 launched yesterday in the US, and early reports from some Sony Bravia owners suggest the audio sync and dropout issues might have been resolved.
To be clear, this software update is not yet available in the UK, so I haven’t been able to test it myself. It’s only a handful of owners in the US who are so far reporting positive news, too, so it’s a little too early to assume everything is hunky-dory.
I have contacted Sony UK for clarification, as well as a date for the software release over here, and I’ll report back if I hear anything.
Still, if the early reports are correct, this already feels like positive movement, and I, for one, am excited for the presumably imminent release of this new software in the UK.
I love my Bravia 8 II, and I would really like to go back to using it as intended.
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