If your Bravia started throwing a black screen at Dolby Vision playback back in July, there is a newer build out and it is worth grabbing, with a caveat you should know before you get your hopes up. The one that caused the mess is 114.602.080.1, pushed to a spread of Sony sets around the end of June. Complaints since have been the usual HDMI passthrough grab bag: audio dropping out, lip sync drifting, DV content simply refusing to start.
The replacement is 114.602.170.1, and the release note is narrow on purpose. It says it resolves an issue where a black screen could be observed when starting playback of specific content from external HDMI devices. That is the whole scope. No mention of audio anywhere in it, and the early owner reports line up exactly with that wording, black screen gone, dropouts unchanged. There is also a second Dolby Vision complaint, scan lines visible in content, that people say is still present.
What bothers me is not that a firmware broke something. Every manufacturer ships a bad build eventually. It is that Sony keeps running this same play: update lands, external audio goes sideways, no fix date is ever given, and the next update quietly repairs one symptom while leaving the other alone. Owners on automatic updates never opted into any of it. If you are still on 080.1 and your problem is audio rather than video, there is nothing here for you yet.
Anyone who took 170.1 with a dropout problem, has your source chain changed anything, AVR in the middle versus straight into the set?
The replacement is 114.602.170.1, and the release note is narrow on purpose. It says it resolves an issue where a black screen could be observed when starting playback of specific content from external HDMI devices. That is the whole scope. No mention of audio anywhere in it, and the early owner reports line up exactly with that wording, black screen gone, dropouts unchanged. There is also a second Dolby Vision complaint, scan lines visible in content, that people say is still present.
What bothers me is not that a firmware broke something. Every manufacturer ships a bad build eventually. It is that Sony keeps running this same play: update lands, external audio goes sideways, no fix date is ever given, and the next update quietly repairs one symptom while leaving the other alone. Owners on automatic updates never opted into any of it. If you are still on 080.1 and your problem is audio rather than video, there is nothing here for you yet.
Anyone who took 170.1 with a dropout problem, has your source chain changed anything, AVR in the middle versus straight into the set?
