Tom Parsons at What Hi-Fi wrote this up on 15 August and it's a familiar kind of misery. His Bravia 8 II OLED took a firmware update and now anything played through an external source, an Apple TV 4K or a Sky Stream puck, drops audio when routed to his external sound system. The TV's own apps are fine. He spent hours on cables and settings before working out the update was the culprit. Sony knows, a fix is apparently in progress, no date, and the bad software has been out for roughly two months.
That pattern is worth noting for anyone diagnosing their own dropouts: internal apps fine, external sources broken points hard at the HDMI audio path rather than the TV as a whole. It's the most fragile part of any modern set, because ARC and eARC handshakes are where three vendors' interpretations of the spec meet, and a firmware change on one side re-opens the argument.
Where I part company with him slightly is the conclusion. Turning off automatic updates isn't free either. You'll miss app compatibility fixes, and on some sets a skipped update means a streaming app quietly stops working months later. The thing I'd actually take from this is the habit: write down your current firmware version somewhere before you accept an update, and give a new release a week while owners report in. That way you have something to tell support when a set that worked in June doesn't work in August.
Anyone here successfully rolled a TV back to a previous firmware version? Every time I've asked a manufacturer the answer was no, which is the real problem.
That pattern is worth noting for anyone diagnosing their own dropouts: internal apps fine, external sources broken points hard at the HDMI audio path rather than the TV as a whole. It's the most fragile part of any modern set, because ARC and eARC handshakes are where three vendors' interpretations of the spec meet, and a firmware change on one side re-opens the argument.
Where I part company with him slightly is the conclusion. Turning off automatic updates isn't free either. You'll miss app compatibility fixes, and on some sets a skipped update means a streaming app quietly stops working months later. The thing I'd actually take from this is the habit: write down your current firmware version somewhere before you accept an update, and give a new release a week while owners report in. That way you have something to tell support when a set that worked in June doesn't work in August.
Anyone here successfully rolled a TV back to a previous firmware version? Every time I've asked a manufacturer the answer was no, which is the real problem.
