I’m thinking about getting a larger television, as what I have is a bit too small for the living room. I have an inexpensive soundbar that mostly works, but doesn’t always turn on with CEC, and occasionally stops passing the video signal through and needs to be power-cycled.
Are there any TVs and soundbars out there that can integrate with Home Assistant, and don’t need a cloud connection at all? (Not even for initial setup.) I was about to buy a Sonos soundbar when they were on sale last month, but discovered that you don’t actually own Sonos devices, since setup is locked behind a cloud account and the company could change the terms of access at its whim.
I’ve read encouraging things about the Sony Bravia devices, and the manuals seem to say that you can set them up entirely locally (although some features are cloud-only). Is this still the case?
I was about to get in the car and go buy the Sonos soundbar, but I checked the manual first. The network setup itself is done through an app that connects via BLE, and to use the app, you first have to create a Sonos account. That’s a ‘no’ from me. I may be unreasonable, but I don’t want to share my personal data and be gate-kept by a company, just to use hardware that I ostensibly own and is sitting in my living room. It’s too bad, because from what I read, the sound quality is excellent.