My family has owned a Vizio TV (model V555-H11) for a while, keeping it disconnected from the internet and using as a dumb display for other devices. The picture has been fine. The audio has had some issues.
We have experienced sound cutting out during quiet parts of movies, often accompanied by a quiet-but-perceptible-and-pretty-annoying-once-you-notice-it popping sound (probably an over-enthusiastic gate without the smarts to quietly clamp the audio, instead just cutting the sound wave abruptly). We are not the only ones, and it’s not just our model.
I had tried different options in the menu to fix it, and not come up with a good fix. But I recently got annoyed enough to try harder to fix it.
What ended up working was a twofold fix:
- update firmware (from 1.11.x to 1.20.y)
- turn “Volume Limiting” off
When I connected the TV to wifi, it was not able to find a firmware update, even though Vizio’s site showed a new version existed. I ended up downloading the firmware and updating using a USB stick (instructions are on the firmware page). The user experience was awfully clunky, involved a factory reset and several TV reboots without showing status, and had me wondering several times if anything was happening—but after 10-15 minutes the TV was updated.
After the firmware update, the gating effect was much less (lower threshold on the gate, or longer hold time, or both?). The pop on either side of the quiet part was gone, which was a win by itself. But, well, we were going to watch a movie in a bit and I wanted to make sure.
So I experimented with other settings. Turning “Volume Limiting” off seemed to help a lot. With “Volume Limiting” turned on, the quiet parts still seemed to get cut out some. With it off, we had the overall volume setting at a higher number, but the sound levels were similar and we could hear (quietly) what was going on during the quiet parts.
Sure, we could get more equipment (e.g., a receiver ahead of the TV) to help with this. But that’d be overkill, when the problem we are really trying to solve is “I’d like to hear the audio without interruptions, please.”
(For those curious, the “test track” was the scene in Encanto in which Mirabel interrupts the party to tell her Abuela that the house is cracking and the magic is in trouble. I had noted that as a troublesome spot before. The noisy party, the hush punctuated by dialogue as they inspect the now-perfectly-fine house, and the sound levels coming up as Abuela announces “The magic is strong, and so are the drinks!” gave me all the conditions I needed to hear to tell whether things were improving or not. And yes, after I got it working, I did give in to the requests to jump to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno“.)
Leave a Reply