Hi @TrickyMuso 

Welcome to the Sonos Community! And, apologies for the delay.

Beam (Gen 1) does not support Atmos, therefore an Ace paired with it cannot play Atmos either.

You can, however, play Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1 in surround sound via Ace with a Beam (Gen 1) soundbar.

I hope this helps.

Thanks Corry! Thought that might be the case based on processing limitations with the gen 1. Found the product documentation not explicit about this, so thanks for the confirmation.

I just watched a Dolby Atmos scene from streaming Netflix with a Google TV OS and E-Arc hardware, switching back and forth between Beam Gen 1 and Beam Gen 2 using Sonos Ace Swap and the signal / sound seems very much the same, so your not missing out on much. Hypothetically you could just use a Ray if your main priority is Movies with Ace and you would get the great sound without any noticeble difference. Might be why they don’t show codec playing now when Ace is paired? If anyone has any mic’s that can do a professional test of sound output from headphones I would be interested but the end of the day, I just did a real world test.

On a side note - Apple Music App sounds great on a LG TV when using Ace so we have done a full circle, I’m now using Windows PC App’s and TV App’s to listen to music again instead of a phone App!

( I have a Ray connected through HDMI extractor on a PC) - this enables listening to lossless Apple Music over WIFI around the house using Ace. - If anyone wants to do the same for listening to music lying in bed, you can set a sleep timer on Windows 10 holding down start button pressing R (For Run) then    shutdown -s -t 2500    is half an hour sleep timer to turn your PC off.