A couple of months back I started playing my way through Assassin’s Creed 3 on my PS3 again, having barely touched it for most of the previous year – and certainly since I got my LG NB2520a soundbar. I soon noticed that every now and again (I’m guessing every 30 minutes or so) the soundbar would switch itself off while playing.
This hasn’t occurred with any other game, Blu-Ray or my YouView box as an input and seemed to be specific to Assassin’s Creed 3. I tried pressing the “Auto Power Off” button to see if disabling this would help – it didn’t.
I then began playing recently began playing DmC – Devil May Cry on the same PS3 and noticed sound issues whereby the sound would cut out for a split second on a fairly frequent basis (every few seconds at times) and did some Googling on this. It looked like this was something to do with the audio output options on the PS3 and was a fault in the game rather than the soundbar (if I turned off the soundbar and played the audio through the TV it still did the same thing).
Given the tip about sound output formats, I tried playing with these and I soon discovered that the issue disappeared if I went intot he PS3’s Audio Output settings and set them to manual to switch off Dolby Digital 5.1 Ch output option . Unfortunately when I did this, DmC started suffering from the same problem as AC3. D’oh!
So my conclusion is that the LG NB2520a really doesn’t work well with DTS sound, at least not coming from a PS3, as I don’t think switching off every 30 minutes is good behaviour.
At the minute the only thing I can think of to fix this is to disable DTS 5.1 Ch output option for Assassin’s Creed 3 (haven’t tried this yet but will give it a go next time I play) and to disable Dolby Digital for DmC and accept that the soundbar is going to switch itself off every now and again. Not exactly ideal but marginally better than having the sound cutting in and out.
What I’m wondering now though is… since the soundbar only outputs 2.1 sound, is there any reason not to just disable both Dolby Digital and DTS and use the PCM 2.1 sound?
