I just use a 3.5mm cable from my monitor headphone jack to my Play:5 Gen 1. Very simple and works no matter which PC is using that monitor (I have several via a KVM). Keeping it simple.

Attempts to digitally take PC audio and stream to Sonos suffer from enormous lag (many have attempted this). Only AirPlay streams avoid this, somehow, but that is mostly Mac-only.

I tend use one of these switches/extractors (link below) - I’ve never had an audio dropout, or headache, with this particular switch, which supports ARC/eARC and Atmos playback. I think these days many soundbar manufacturers see the TV as being the primary HUB for all A/V devices to connect to, but these switches are ideal, if you don’t want to leave the TV ‘ON’ for audio playback/pass-through…

https://feintech.eu/en/products/feintech-vax04101-hdmi-earc-pass-switch-4x1

I’m afraid you didn’t read my post carefully regarding which connects to which. And there’s the Audio Over Ethernet protocol, for example. I’m also not talking about any audio streaming in the “classic" sense but use the wired connection from PC via Switch to the Soundbar (wired = speeds of 10 gbps) to have the Soundbar be visible to Windows as a sound driver.

Now you can stream from Windows media player and the Sonos Soundbar is visibe to Windows 10 but it shows as “Other Device” and it can’t be used as a Speaker in the pure sense (select it for playback from Windows’ sound settings)

The assumption that I make as to why Sonos doesn’t implement these things is likely they don’t perceive that there is a market for the suggestions that you have that would match the cost involved in adding the hardware necessary, or the software development necessary.

Essentially, they’re not interested in selling speakers designed for computers, as there are already quite a few companies in that space. They want to focus on their current product venues, networked music, and home theater setups. 

Hi.  That is all to do with the networking, which is identical whatever the source device.  The real issue is the audio connection, not the network connection, and the audio connection requires an HDMI-ARC feed.  The target market is TVs, and I think that is entirely understandable.

Hi @ciupibz 

Welcome to the Sonos Community! I've marked this thread as a feature request and it will be seen by the relevant teams for consideration.

Incidentally, if you only use your TV for gaming, you could just connect the Beam directly to the PC via S/PDIF (optical) using the adaptor supplied with the Beam. Set S/PDIF as your default sound device in Windows and all PC audio will come from the Beam, whether the TV is on or off.

More info can be found here:

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

I also use the TV as a TV, so the option to connect the Sonos directly to PC is not an option for me.

It sounds to me what you really want is a windows/microsoft version of Apple airplay.  Airrplay will send any audio playing on your iPhone/iPad/AppleTV/Mac to an airplay compliant speaker (Sonos is) over the local network.  To my knowledge, there isn’t an equivalent on Windows.  Sonos can play audio files from a library on your computer, and of course, you can control playback of streaming services on Sonos via the Sonos app or some streaming service apps.  There might be some third party software that can send out the audio via a URL that Sonos can pick up on, but I would think that would have significant lag.

I understand the assumption that something like this should exist in 2022, but to my knowledge, it does not exist for windows, with Sonos speakers or any other speaker.

Hi @ciupibz 

You may be able to watch your locally-available TV stations on the Web, in which case you could watch TV on the PC, on the TV, with sound from the Beam. With no remote, this isn’t as convenient, but worth mentioning, seeing as other options simply aren’t available. Alternatively, a TV Tuner/capture card could be added via PCIe or USB 3, but this clearly isn’t the cheapest of options.

As @melvimbe mentions, what you describe (a networked sound device) can be done with a Mac, via AirPlay, which the Beam is compatible with. It typically doesn’t work well if there are long periods of silence, however, as the connection is timed-out after a while. Additionally, the only way to broadcast AirPlay from a Windows computer is to use iTunes, and that will not stream system sounds, which is what you’d need.

The main reason we split our software into S1 and S2 is so that we could utilise the greater resource capacity of our newer devices so that adding features like what you suggest is at least possible. Perhaps we’ll introduce something like it one day - presumably, everyone who enquires about connecting the Beam to a PC (and there are a few) would be interested. Thanks again for your feedback - keep it coming!

Thank you @Corry P ,

It just feels so frustrating for the device to have a network port (RJ-45) and its use to be minimal. 

If I understand correctly, now, the RJ-45 port can only be used to link the beam to other Sonos sound devices on the Lan.

It just feel as such a waste (to not make use of the wired connection)… :)

Hi @ciupibz 

Computers will do what you tell them to do, so it’s certainly not outside the realms of possibility that someone could write a simple Windows application that streams system audio to which a Sonos system could “tune in”. I’m not aware of any, however. It would probably require a matching service to be added to Sonos, but we’re open to that. As @melvimbe mentions, however, there would likely be significant enough latency in this process that the audio would be noticeably behind any video/events.

Plus, we’re always looking for other options for playback - it may be a case of simply watching this space.

There have been multiple attempts to capture PC audio and stream it to Sonos devices. The one I am most familiar could not do this without substantial latency, as the streaming-from-url Sonos code is simply not designed for low-latency. The real fix would be to leverage the virtual-line-in API set that AirPlay uses, but no-one has figured that out so far.

I did have a feeling you’d know more about this than I do, @controlav. Thanks!

Correct, regarding the use of the ethernet port on the Beam.  Other Sonos devices, like the Amp, have 2 ports on the back, so the can be use to connect other devices to the network, but they cannot be used to send audio from non Sonos sources.   

Honestly though, if Sonos were to work with Microsoft on a way to send PC audio to the speakers, or MS just built a generic way to do this the way Apple did, then it would likely be wireless...like Airplay.  I really don’t think MS has a lot of motivation to do this though.  Apple did it to help sell their phones and homepods, only adding it to Macs because it was ‘easy’ at that point.  MS doesn’t have phones or speakers, so they have less reason.  It does seem like it would be an interesting feature for xbox...but xbox are designed to connect to TVs.  But, it never hurts to ask.