My Experience of Sony KD-49X8309C
Being a long time user and believer that anything with the Sony mark on means the product exudes quality, It's going to be very frustrating writing this review, and apologies but it may not be the easiest read either. However, here goes.
The TV was updated after a factory reset yesterday to 5.1.1. It was purchased from a Sony center on 15th November this year.
First of all, the picture is outstanding, especially with 4K material, but on standard HD it is also very nice. Watching Toy Story very recently from a standard HD broadcast was breath taking and I had to double check we didn’t have a Blu-ray disk inserted. I was also shocked at how easy it was to set the TV up. I plugged it in to the mains whist I continued to watch my current TV and soon after connecting it to the wireless network it was updated to the then latest version, and displaying 4K test content via YouTube. The only connection was the mains cord in to the wall!
What really lets this TV down though is the crappy, buggy Android interface. Sure, Sony are releasing (slowly but surely) updates to render certain aspects of it usable, but quite frankly getting the population of Britain to act as beta testers is quite simply wrong!
So let's start from the beginning. I own several Sonos items, and let that be a lesson to Sony of how a company takes a product to market and makes it user friendly from day one. It's a flawless wireless music system. So I decided I wanted a high quality, new 4K TV to replace my slightly aging Samsung Series 6. After pondering for many months in Currys, I decided to finally make a purchase from Basingstoke's Sony Center. What made me choose them? Well, the staff were very good and I had already vowed never to buy from Currys again. I particularly wanted the Sonos Playbar to accompany my Sonos Amp, Play 5 and couple of Play Ones, but that would have cost about £2,000 in total with the Sonos Woofer as well. So for now I opted for the TV with a reasonably good Sony playbar which has the wireless (Bluetooth) sub. My plan was that the shared folder which is on my network used to store all the music (fed by iTunes imports and read by the Sonos players) could also be access by the Sony TV and independently play the music through its connected Sony Playbar. Not perfect, but a compromise. In fairness, no one at Sony or anywhere else had said this is possible, but I just naturally assumed it would be, as the Sony had the ability to access a network wirelessly (or using an Ethernet cable), and also had the ability to play music, video and pictures etc. from an external source. It shouldn’t be that difficult should it, I mused?
So, let me introduce you to problem number one. The Sony TV can't do this. You cannot manually set a network path in the TV to act as a music source. Instead it just scans and finds devices (and folders used by those devices). It does see a folders area and I can browse the artists / albums etc., but it refuses to play anything showing an error such as 'Cannot play media' or similar. I believe it finds the folders via the Sonos devices, and indeed it does find the Sonos players in 'Devices'. Indeed it is also perfectly understandable to me that it cannot play anything via the device because it is essentially alien to the Sonos, and Sonos can only be controlled via its own App or controller. So essentially the Sonos says, “who are you, go away”. I never expected to be able to see the Sonos and play the media attached to it via the TV, but I did expect to be able to point the TV to the shared area used by the Sonos (and iTunes). After all, if I browse the network from any other device (PC, laptop, iPhone etc) I can select a MP3 file from the folder and play it, with or without using a Sonos app. This is not a 'permissions thing' either, because the share is open to read-only by anyone or any device.
So enter problem number two. I then copied the entire contents of the shared folder to a 32 gig USB key. This is not an ideal solution as the shared folder is easily managed, and had using this shared area worked it would have been perfectly usable. So my general routine is, I take a new CD and insert it in to my PC CD drive and iTunes pops up asking if I want to import it. iTunes is set to use and import everything to the shared folder so after importing it is a simple case of re-indexing the Sonos library using any Sonos app (this is so easy to do) and now any Sonos device has the new CD available to it. Where using the USB method as a solution falls over (apart from other reasons explained later) is that every time I do this I will have to then manually copy the newly added content to the USB key!
Playing the music on the USB key is a real chore and it is an unreliable solution! Going in to Music, it doesn't show everything, I need to go in and out of the app a few times to get the content to refresh and show everything. If I select Artists, after selecting an artist I get a busy round circle as it scans. This takes ages and happens for every artist whether there is one album under it or several. Also, despite playing what purports to be Dazed and Confused from Led Zep 1, I hear a mysterious song I’ve never heard of which I can only assume is included in a default location which is installed at first set up! Eventually all the associated albums appear and so I select one. What do I see? just 'Shuffle All', not play all. After much fannying around I eventually realize if you select track one and play it, the rest of the tracks 'should' follow on and play thereafter. However, this doesn't always seem to be the case. It's hit and miss. Going in via folders or albums shows the content much quicker, but still the same issues with what you see. Stupid Shuffle All, no Play All. It is so unintuitive! I thought I'c cracked it at one point because the default setting within the 'Player' had shuffle enabled, but switching it off made no difference. I just want to play the damn album, reliably!
So I finally give in to defeat and reluctantly choose to go with this buggy method and due to the fact that it is so long winded, I wrote it all down for my Wife to follow, which took me about two hours due to the fact I had to change it so many times because of the varying erratic behavior of the 'features'. One minute it sipped to the next track, the next it just stopped there. The first time I did it I saw all the folders, the next time I only saw one page load. One minute I went to Music and it showed me everything, the next I could only see the bundled content, meaning the USB key wasn’t being seen this time…. I’m sure you get my drift!
The next day, we powered the TV on to actually do something quite strange, watch TV! Suddenly, we started seeing a pop up showing 'USB device found, please make sure the device is deactivated before removal'. Why this all of a sudden? To make matters far worse, I could net get rid of it, it simply kept appearing, followed closely by a very useful (useless!) box containing the three apps that can be associated with USB device content, Music, Video and Albums (pictures), disappearing for four seconds then appearing again. In the end I had to yank the device out to stop it, ignoring the on screen warning because I had absolutely no idea how on earth you 'deactivate the USB device before unplugging' and was in no mood to try and work it out!
So now I have abandoned all idea of using USB and resorted to the following. I've placed my Sonos Play 5 behind the TV. Connected its headphone socket output to the Playbar Analogue input. This is a waste of a Play 5, but it does now give me the ability to play music to the Play 5 aptly called 'Wasted 4 TV' which then plays through the TV's Sony playbar (and sub, which incidentally does sound quite good). It does mean I have to manually switch the playbar to the correct input and I do now have two ways of controlling the volume (Sonos app and Playbar) which can also lead to issues if I leave the volume up too high and we switch to TV or Sonos in another room! At least it is somewhat reliable though. It bypasses the TV altogether and just relies on the playbar being on and having the correct input selected.
Aside from these issues, I have had total black screen, total grey screen, neither of which responded to any button press and needed a power cycle of the TV to sort it.
USB device not seen, plug in to other USB port, still not seen, plug back in to first port then it's seen!
Sound out of sync with HD channel 4. Turn over then back again and much better but still about 50 milliseconds out.
Switch to TV from one of the Android apps and the sound is half speed. Yes, suddenly the weather girl sounds like Guy The Gorilla! Switch to something different then back again and she's returned to her usual familiar shrill tones.
So as a summary, a nice television set with great picture, let down by horrendous Android OS and riddled with bugs. It has left me with one conundrum. Should I have waited a year to give Sony the chance to (a) make Android a workable solution, or (b) ditch it and find a better interface. I should not be asking myself this question after having spent almost £1,000 on a TV not even a month ago. By the way, I am no idiot, I am an IT manager and also have a lot of experience as an audio engineer with my own home recording music studio, so I know my stuff. I'm not blowing my own trumpet but simply discounting the fact I may have missed something or not set it up correctly!
