I’ve been a long time user of Sonos speakers. I bought my first Sonos Play:5 in the US in November 2012. Back when Sonos wasn’t really even a household brand. I carried this Sonos Play:5 to India with me and eventually brought it to my place in Lisbon.
Later I bought a Play:1 and used it in my bedroom. In recent months I was thinking of getting a soundbar or some other type of audio setup for my living room TV. Unfortunately, everything I read about soundbars says that you need to spend a lot of money to get a reasonably good system. Besides that, due to sonic and physical limitations, soundbars still fall far behind when compared to quality speaker setups.
So I decided to use my Play:5 with it’s line-in port as a speaker for my television. Unfortunately, due to the way the Sonos system is designed, there’s noticeable lag when you connect an aux input to the speaker. This isn’t an issue when you’re playing music through the speaker, but when video and audio need to be in sync you’ll often notice lip-sync issues.
I tried everything to get rid of the lag but unfortunately this is by design because Sonos is designed to be a multi-room speaker setup. So the speakers tend to buffer music so that they can be in sync across rooms and network issues don’t present a challenge.
There was no workaround to this so I just pretended not to notice the tiny bit of lip-sync lag. Subconsciously though, it grates on my mind. So much so that I recently started looking into buying a soundbar again. I didn’t want to go through setting up a whole 2.1 or 5.1 system in my living room so the easiest option was to get a new soundbar and hook it up to the TV.
However, while searching for a new soundbar for some reason, and I cannot remember why, I googled: play 5 aux lag. I had searched for this many times back in the day when I was trying to get my Play:5 to work without any audio lag. But unfortunately I had failed.
This time though I found a very interesting thread on the Sonos community forums. A post on the forums by mikefnasr talks about a workaround to the lag issue. The gist of it is that you need to setup the Play:5 as a physically networked speaker (so an ethernet connection) and then it should get rid of the input lag on the line-in port. This makes total sense since a physically connected speaker doesn’t need to account for wifi introduced latency.
In any case, I tried out the workaround and it worked perfectly on my Play:5! Finally I can use it on my TV as a standalone speaker with no annoying lip-sync issues. A total Christmas miracle! Or a basic expectation from any speaker system. Take your pick.