Does anyone here with a Sony Android Smart TV also use a dedicated streaming device?

[MrHT]

Originally Posted by MrHT

Wow, I bought the Roku Streaming Stick last week and gave it a full week test and am having AV sync issues. There's very noticeable audio lag on the Vudu and Movies Anywhere apps. So I'll be returning this. Two strikes now.

Geez, no wonder why these streaming devices are so cheap. They all suck! I'll just be using my Android TV for streaming. As flawed as it is, it seems to be the least problematic.

I'm afraid I might have returned a perfectly working device. Best Buy currently has the Roku Premiere on sale for $27.99 so I went ahead and bought it the other day to give this one last try. Given that I don't have a 4K AVR, I hooked it up to my TV and had the audio pass through the TV and into my receiver via the ARC function. And I had the same issue as the Roku Stick where there was an audio delay. So I decided to try and hook it up to the AVR using 1080p resolution and lo and behold, no more audio delay. Apparently, the audio delay was caused by the passthrough on my TV. How silly that Sony has this glitch on their TVs!

Anyways, since my AVR does not have 4K passthrough ability, I can't watch 4K so, I'm limited to 1080p. But truth be told, I'm ok with that. I think HD content looks fabulous on my TV and since my TV is only 43", the difference is not much when watching 4K material. And not to mention that my TV sucks displaying HDR content. I have the Sony XBR-43X800E TV, which is a pretty low end TV with poor HDR capabilities. SDR content looks fantastic, but HDR content looks very dark with dull colors, so I'm ok with sticking with HD SDR content on this TV until I get a better TV at some point down the road. Though it would be nice to get a 4K receiver at some point and then just manually set the Roku at 4K SDR for optimum picture quality.

So far, the Roku Premiere seems to work well now so keeping my fingers crossed that this one works out for me! My Smart TV is getting more sluggish by the day and it seems to get even worse with more updates. I don't think the processor and RAM is all that powerful on my Android TV, so as apps get updated and require better hardware, it's starting to make my TV suffer during operation.