HW-K650 and Two R1 Wirelss Speakers in 5.1 With KS7000 TV

[podavies]

When using the K650 sound bar and two R1 Wireless speakers in surround sound mode over wifi with the latest firmware, The quailty of the sound K650 drops, sounds very muddy. As soon as you use the sound bar on it own, the sound bar improves. this is happening for a quite a few users.

can you help.

[Peejay84]

The update didn't do anything for me sadly. Rears via WiFi or Arc setup are still extremely low. 

Optical still works fine

[leelazer]

So. With hesitant excitement I performed the update on the soundbar and........it's still exactly the same over WiFi. Rears are half the volume of the soundbar even with the soundbar turned all the way down and the rears turned all the way up. Gutted yet again. 

Lee

[JCFARROW]

Im away from home so cannot test, but my understanding is theres been an update which has worked for some but not for others...sounds familiar. At least it shows Samsung is in fact working on a fixdespite trying to say the last update fixed it. 

This new update will make  the engineer visits all the more interesting / useful- look forward to hearing how that goes. 

[Robbienobs]

I will be testing tonight on the new firmware with my shiny new hdmi lead. 

I will report back and also book the engineers visit for asap once I am done. 

[abob36]

I updated my soundbar and did a bunch of testing. And...It sounds the same. No difference at all that I can discern. Such a letdown.

[simon_w]

Hi folks

I've been following this thread for a while - thanks everyone for persavering with this debacle - think its time to pitch in with a few observations from my setup...

First of all a disclosure - I am a trained audio/video engineer - 5 years in the BBC and thirty as a freelance - I work in the music industry recording and filming concerts and sessions.  I produce 5.1 content so have a pretty good understanding of how this should all work.

My system is a K650 soundbar, two R1s, a Samsung Hub and a 7 series UHD TV - all bought last October.

Initially (like others early in this thread) the surround over WiFi worked fine - albeit with regular lost connections.  Note - the normal listening volume on the soundbar needed to be set between 30 and 40.

Then the updates for connection issues broke this and since then there has been almost no discernable signal from the rear speakers over WiFi.

I can confirm that it works over optical (with HDMI disconnected) but often the sound and picture are out of sync depending on the source (beyond the realms of the audio delay adjustment) - this and the "how to control the volume" issue render this useless.

I have never been able to get the HDMI ARC to work stabally - for some reason it is intermittint, dropping out every 5 to 10 seconds for about 1 second.  I have tried a selection of HDMI  cables and know that the current one is HDMI2 compliant.

With the latest firmware patches the WiFi connection is now reliable and stable with good AV sync from all sources but practically no signal in the rears - I would guess 30 to 40 dB down on the sound bar - something is there if you put your ear right up to it.  Note that the normal listening level from the soundbar is now around 17 to 20 - much lower than it was before the firmware "break"

What I do notice now is that if you do a speaker test from the app or from the TV menu the channel ident level in the rears sounds very healthy - about 3dB down on the sound bar even with the bar turned all the way down and the R1s all the way up - this is new with the latest update I think so something has changed...

As others have reported streaming music via the multiroom app produces excellent level in the R1s and bar and works well.

To save others grief - things I have tried to no avail:

Full reset to factory settings on the bar and the R1s

Ungrouping - lifting the R1 volumes to max - regrouping etc

And of course contacting Samsung Support who were so hopeless I gave up completely...

So as an engineer I would say the following:

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the WiFi connection or the ability to send a correctly synced surround signal to the rear speakers - if there was neither the channel ident nor the multiroom audio-only playing would work.

The problem is in the demultiplexing of the 5.1 bitstream from the TV in the soundbar.  In a Dolby 5.1 stream there is embedded metadata that tells the decoder to what specification and mix level the stream was encoded.  If this data is read incorrectly the wrong levels will be sent to the rear channels - I believe this is where the problem lies.

Robbienobs - your engineers visit will be very interesting and I really hope for the sake of everyone the fault is reproducable for the engineer and he/she documents the exact setup so the boffins can reproduce it back at Samsung HQ and find where the problem lies...

I feel everyones frustration with this but in the knowledge that Samsung moderate this forum lets stay posative and keep pushing for a solution...

Simon

[JCFARROW]

Samsung give this man a job!

[abob36]

Just to echo Simon, I too, have noticed the audio sync issues with optical which should not happen. It is much more pronounced than if you are on Wi-Fi. Also his experience with this kit matches mine as well.

[frustrated]

My setup is the same and behaves in the same way Simon describes. 

Is it possible that the problem lies with the tv not sending the correct data via HDMI or WiFi?

It would be interesting to hear if this 5.1 setup works with other brands if tv using arc HDMI.

[simon_w]

The transmission of audio over HDMI and TosLink (optical) are set down in internationally agreed standards so that they are compatible across all manufacturers and decoding chips. Notwithstanding any intermittency or sync issues the K650 can clearly decode the optical stream correctly - the actual data stream over HDMI should be identical. Testing this with a 3rd party sound bar should confirm this instantly.

The 5.1 over WiFi protocol is proprietary to Samsung and almost certainly recodes the data stream in some way to make it more robust to timing issues over Wifi - it is certainly possible that the problem lies with either the TV's wifi output or the soundbar's input - or even the surround speakers but I doubt it.

Perhaps Samsung would like to enlighten us as to exactly how the signals are transmitted - we know that all the devices are connected to the router or smart hub but which device is in charge of clock timing, sync and level...? Is the same multiplexed stream sent to all speakers and de-multiplexed locally or does each device only receive its assigned stream?

What we do know is that the basic multi room system does work correctly when being fed a 2.0 stream from a phone etc. The sound bar creates a faux surround version of the stereo signal and sends it to the rear speakers.

All our problems come from using a true 5.1 AC3 source from disc, stream or DVB.

If anyone is so troubled by this that they cannot sleep 😉 have a look at the Dolby 5.1 specifications on the Dolby website: https://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/dolby-digital.html - this will give you an insight into the complexity of the Dolby data stream and all the possible decoding pitfalls...