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auximenes

About 3 months ago I bought a XR-42A90K TV, HT-A8000 soundbar, SA-SW5 sub & SA-RS5 surround speakers. Set it up without any issues. I had to wait a few weeks to have a bespoke stand built to get the TV into its final position. At this point I went back into the settings for the first time to change the position of the soundbar relative to the TV. This is when I discovered that the Acoustic Centre Sync settings were now greyed out.

After reseating cables, restarting and checking that the setting to automatically update software was working, I have now established the following, repeatable pattern:

If you start the system up from cold using the TV remote, the soundbar does not detect the Acoustic Center Sync option as available and greys it out in the app
If you then turn the system off and back on again via the TV remote, the sound bar does detect the Acoustic Center Sync option and uses it

Once it's working it stays working: it just fails to handshake properly on powering up once everything has been off for a certain amount of time (precise duration yet to be established).

I found a similar post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/1me9izo/acoustic_center_sync_not_always_working/. Has anyone on this forum encountered this issue, and managed to solve it? Thanks.

auximenes

Another similar post: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/1kmb97c/acoustic_center_sync_suddenly_unavailable_in_app/.

Is it necessary to disconnect everything from the TV and do a full factory reset of every device to troubleshoot this?

auximenes

I wasted a huge amount of time doing a factory reset to no avail – I even encountered the issue when only the TV and soundbar were connected, before adding everything else back. I have now discovered that the issue will always occur if any device other than the remote is used to turn the TV on, eg: turning on a BRAVIA Sync device first and having it start the TV / soundbar. It will also happen if the TV was turned off by anything other than the remote… What's more, it will also happen if the TV was turned off with the remote after the soundbar has turned itself off – either because I was using headphones or because it powers down when idle quicker than the TV does…

The workaround is to always turn the TV on, then off, then on with the remote only… That is ridiculous though!

auximenes

Annoyingly, discovered an update to another user's thread from 4 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/1me9izo/acoustic_center_sync_not_always_working/.

UPDATE: I kind of found a fix for just the Apple tv. This problem seems to be directly tied to how devices can power on the tv through the HDMI connection. Unfortunately this fix does require disabling that exact feature on the consoles in order for Acoustic Center Sync to work when powering the tv on with the Apple tv remote. This would mean having to use either the Sony tv remote or Apple tv remote to turn on the tv and using the Sony remote to manually switch to a console as that feature would also be disabled. Not ideal but it is my preference because most often I like only using one remote when watching tv and my Apple tv is what i use for viewing all content outside of gaming.

Solution: First you have to disable the Switch 2 and PS5 from powering on tv otherwise if you only apply the fix to the Apple tv and turn the tv on with one of the consoles controllers it’ll break it again for the Apple tv. After disabling those options on the consoles you then want to switch the volume control setting on the Apple tv to IR and then you can switch it back to HDMI if you want to but switching it back is not necessary.

Switch 2: System Settings > Display > Turn OFF Match TV Power State

PS5: Settings > System > HDMI > Turn OFF Enable One-Touch Play

Apple tv remote fix: Turn the tv OFF and then ON ensuring to do both with the Sony tv remote then follow these steps on Apple tv - Settings > Remotes and Devices > Volume Control > Switch it to either of the IR options.

From there you can continue to turn the tv on and off with either the Apple tv remote or the Sony tv remote and there will be no issues(at least from my testing so far).

I really hope Sony fixes this problem through an update to the tv or soundbar. I had called them and after over an hour of troubleshooting with them they did confirm that it seemed like a problem with the software/firmware and would escalate it to potentially be solved in an update but honestly I have no clue if it’ll actually happen. This is far from the ideal solution where all devices work as intended but it is the one that allows me to watch tv all through one remote and still have Acoustic Center Sync available. Of course you could just ignore all those steps and only turn on the tv using just the Sony remote before turning on a connected device and it would still preserve the ability to switch between inputs using the console controllers and not needing the tv remote to do so.

That would have saved some wasted time!