The ‘app’ doesn’t read files. The speakers do. In order to ‘play’ 5.1 or Atmos files, you need your PC to send them to your TV. The electronics in the TV splits the audio from the video, and sends the audio back out the ARC/eARC port to your Sonos Arc, where the signal is interpreted, and split in to the appropriate channels, and sent to the various speakers.
You can see which formats Sonos supports in the supported audio formats FAQ.
Ah, I missed the ‘no TV’ question. In order to do so, you’d need a device that mimics the electronics in the TV set.
There is the HD Fury Arcana, the Feintech VAX04101k, and the latest, and least expensive, I think, is the OREI HDA-935. Check your local retailers for availability, or Amazon. You can also order from those links from the companies directly, I think. All of these create the HDMI eARC signal without requiring the use of the TV set.
Really appreciate the response Airgethlam, but i’m failing to understand why i can’t send the data to the speaker over wifi? Why is it absolutely required to funnel to hdmi/optic ports? It doesn’t make sense to me that i would spend $850 on an atmos wifi speaker that doesn’t have the ability to play music over wifi.
Really appreciate the response Airgethlam, but i’m failing to understand why i can’t send the data to the speaker over wifi? Why is it absolutely required to funnel to hdmi/optic ports? It doesn’t make sense to me that i would spend $850 on an atmos wifi speaker that doesn’t have the ability to play music over wifi.
You didn’t spend “$850 on an atmos wifi speaker”, you spent $850 on an Atmos soundbar that is also a WiFi smart speaker. That aside, you can play Atmos music tracks from Amazon Music or Apple Music.
Really appreciate the response Airgethlam, but i’m failing to understand why i can’t send the data to the speaker over wifi? Why is it absolutely required to funnel to hdmi/optic ports? It doesn’t make sense to me that i would spend $850 on an atmos wifi speaker that doesn’t have the ability to play music over wifi.
Sonos can play atmos music through Amazon music and possibly some other streaming services, as well as through the HDMI port. Sonos hasn’t done the development and testing to allow playback of atmos audio through a local library. I would assume because there are just not a lot of people out there asking for the feature, since very few people maintain local libraries and those libraries contain atmos files and they own an Arc soundbar but don’t have it connected to a TV to play the file through. I wouldn’t be surprised if the demand does start going up though as the volume of atmos music increases and the price of streaming services climb….but not any time soon.
You can see which formats Sonos supports in the supported audio formats FAQ.
Supported audio formats for Sonos music library
Sonos supports the following audio formats when streaming from your local music library or Android device. Sonos systems support mono (1-channel) or stereo (2-channel) audio files with sample rates up to 48kHz.
Yes, those are the supported formats for the Sonos Music Library. Not for the digital input across ARC inputs on the Beam, Amp, and Arc, which are not part of the Sonos Music Library. Two different things.
