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TV audio out of sync? How to fix lip sync

When the sound and the picture drift apart, with dialogue landing a beat after the lips move, it is almost always a delay you can dial out in a setting, not a fault in the TV. The picture takes longer to process than the sound, so the audio usually arrives too early and has to be held back. Here is how to tell which way yours is off, and where to correct it.

Which way is it off?

Work out the direction first, because the fix depends on it. In the great majority of cases the sound is ahead of the picture: The TV spends time processing the image, especially with motion smoothing and other effects switched on, while the audio sails straight through, so the voice reaches you before the matching lip movement. Far more rarely the sound lags behind the picture, usually when it takes a long path through a soundbar or a Bluetooth link. Our Audio Sync Test flashes a block and plays a click at the same instant, so you can see at a glance whether your sound leads or trails the picture.

The lip sync setting on the TV

Every modern TV has a control made for exactly this. It is usually called Audio Delay, A/V Sync or Lip Sync, and it lives in the sound menu. It lets you nudge the audio later in small steps until the voices land on the lips. If the sound is early, which is the common case, increase the delay until it matches. Make the adjustment while something with clear speech is playing, a news anchor or an interview, because a talking face makes the smallest error easy to spot.

When the sound comes from a soundbar or receiver

If your audio runs through a soundbar or an AV receiver, the delay control on that device is often the better place to fix it, and some TVs hand the adjustment over to the soundbar completely. Set the TV's own audio delay to zero first, then use the soundbar's lip sync or audio delay setting, so you are only correcting in one place. Bluetooth speakers and headphones are a special case: They add a large, sometimes changing delay of their own that no setting fully removes, which is why a wired or HDMI ARC connection stays in sync far more reliably.

Motion smoothing and picture processing

The heavier the picture processing, the further the image falls behind the sound, so processing is often the hidden cause. Motion smoothing, noise reduction and some picture modes all add delay to the image while leaving the audio untouched. Turning them off, or switching the picture to a low-lag mode, both shrinks the offset and often improves the picture anyway. On many sets Game Mode strips out this processing and pulls sound and picture back together as a side effect, which is why gamers rarely meet lip sync problems.

Is it one app, or everything?

As with missing sound, narrow it down. If only one streaming app drifts while live TV and other apps stay in sync, it is the app or the stream, not your TV: Close the app fully and reopen it, and try the same title on another service if you can. A bad stream can be out of sync at the source, and no TV setting will fix that one. If every source drifts by about the same amount, it is a TV or soundbar setting, and the lip sync control above is the cure.

Questions people ask

To measure the offset instead of guessing at it, run the Audio Sync Test and read off which way to nudge the delay. If the sound is missing rather than merely late, our no sound on your TV guide walks through that instead.