More Than Just Pixels: Why Gamers Need a Soundbar That Understands VRR and ALLM

You’re deep in a firefight in Call of Duty. You pull the trigger. You see the muzzle flash on your screen instantly, but the thunderous crack of the rifle shot feels a fraction of a second late. Or maybe you’re exploring the neon-drenched streets of Cyberpunk 2077, and the world stutters for a split second, the visuals tearing just as the audio glitches.

These are not huge, game-breaking bugs. They are tiny, almost imperceptible moments of desynchronization. But for a gamer, they are immersion killers. They are constant, nagging reminders that you are playing a game, not living in a virtual world. In the pursuit of ultimate gaming performance, we obsess over GPUs, refresh rates, and response times. But we often overlook a critical part of the chain: our audio equipment.

With the advent of the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and powerful PCs, two technologies from the HDMI 2.1 specification have become essential for top-tier gaming: ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) and VRR (Variable Refresh Rate). You probably bought your TV specifically because it supported them. But did you know that if you route your console through a soundbar, that soundbar must also understand these technologies? If it doesn’t, it becomes a bottleneck, silently stripping away the very features you paid for.

The Automatic Butler: What ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) Does for Your Sound

Think of ALLM as an automatic butler for your entertainment system. When your console or PC starts a game, it sends a signal down the HDMI cable that says, “Hey, we’re gaming now. Drop everything and prepare for action.”

In response, every ALLM-compatible device in the chain, including your TV and your soundbar, instantly switches to its “Game Mode.” This does two crucial things:
1. For the TV: It turns off all non-essential video processing that adds delay (or “input lag”), such as motion smoothing and noise reduction. This ensures the fastest possible time from button press to on-screen action.
2. For the Soundbar: It does the same for audio. It bypasses any extra sound processing modes (like virtual surround expansion) that might add even a few milliseconds of delay. It ensures the audio path is as direct and fast as possible.

According to the SMPTE standard for lip-sync, the human brain can start to detect audio/video sync issues with a delay as small as 40-60 milliseconds. ALLM is designed to keep all processing delays to an absolute minimum to stay well within this threshold. It’s a “set it and forget it” feature that guarantees your system is always in its most responsive state for gaming.

So, ALLM acts like a smart switch, instantly putting your entire system on high alert for gaming. It’s the first step to eliminating lag. But what about the moment-to-moment chaos of an intense firefight, where your console’s frame rate is fluctuating wildly? For that, we need a far more dynamic solution.

The Smooth Operator: How VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) Tames Audio-Visual Chaos

Traditionally, a TV has a fixed refresh rate, like 60Hz or 120Hz. It expects a new picture frame from the game console 60 or 120 times every second. But in a complex game, the console can’t always render frames at that perfect, steady pace. When the action gets intense, the frame rate might drop to, say, 52 frames per second (fps).

When this mismatch happens, the TV is forced to either display the same frame twice (causing stutter) or try to display a half-rendered new frame (causing a “screen tear,” where the image looks horizontally sheared).

VRR solves this by turning the relationship on its head. Instead of the TV demanding frames at a fixed rate, the TV now waits patiently for the console to send a new frame, and only then does it refresh the screen. The result is a perfectly smooth, tear-free visual experience, even when the frame rate is fluctuating.

But how does this affect audio? Modern game audio is not a pre-recorded track; it’s generated in real-time by the game engine, tightly synchronized with the on-screen action and physics. The timing of audio events is locked to the rendering of game frames. VRR creates a world where the timing of video frames is now variable. The audio system must be aware of this and stay in perfect lockstep with this dynamic “dance.” A system that fully supports VRR ensures that the audio samples are delivered in sync with their corresponding video frames, preserving the crucial timing between seeing an explosion and hearing it.

The Bottleneck in the Middle: Why Your Soundbar MUST Support Both

This brings us to the critical point. Most gamers connect their console directly to their soundbar’s HDMI input, and then use the soundbar’s HDMI output to send the video to the TV. This setup, called HDMI passthrough, is great for getting the highest quality uncompressed audio.

But here’s the catch: the soundbar is now the gatekeeper for all information passing from the console to the TV.

[Image of a signal flow diagram: Console -> Soundbar -> TV]

If your soundbar, like the LG S80TR, has HDMI 2.1 ports that support VRR and ALLM passthrough, the data flows freely. The ALLM “we’re gaming” signal passes through, and the VRR handshake between the console and TV happens without issue.

However, if your soundbar does not support these features, it acts as a dumb pipe that doesn’t understand the special language of gaming. It will strip out the ALLM and VRR data packets from the signal before sending it to the TV. Your console and TV will never know they were supposed to be in their super-fast, super-smooth gaming modes. You will get great audio, but you will lose the core next-gen gaming features you bought your console and TV for. You’ve created a bottleneck.

Building the Ultimate Lag-Free Setup: A Gamer’s Checklist

To ensure you’re getting the absolute most out of your gaming setup, you need to verify your entire signal chain.

1. The Source (Console/PC): Ensure VRR and ALLM are enabled in your PS5, Xbox Series X, or PC graphics card settings.
2. The Cables: You must use “Ultra High Speed” certified HDMI cables. Older “Premium High Speed” cables may not have the bandwidth required for 4K at 120Hz with VRR.
3. The Gatekeeper (Soundbar/AVR): This is the most overlooked step. Check the specifications of your audio device. It MUST explicitly state that it supports 4K/120Hz, VRR, and ALLM passthrough. Don’t just look for “HDMI 2.1,” as not all features are mandatory.
4. The Display (TV/Monitor): Verify that the HDMI port your soundbar is connected to is the TV’s full-spec HDMI 2.1 port (some TVs only have one or two) and that Game Mode, VRR, and any equivalent features are enabled in the TV’s settings.

Gaming is a hobby of inches and milliseconds. We invest in powerful hardware to gain a competitive edge and deepen our immersion. Ensuring your soundbar isn’t holding your visuals hostage is a crucial, and often forgotten, step in building that perfect, lag-free gaming sanctuary.