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Beam 1gen vs 2gen PCM


Hello friends,

I own a Beam 1gen working with 2xOne SL as surround speakers.

When I play movies encoded with AAC 5.1, the audio is played on the Sonos system as Stereo PCM. I understand this is due to Sonos not licensing AAC audio.

Howeve, today I read that the Beam 2gen and the Arc are both compatible with Multichannel PCM and Dolby Multichannel PCM. Does this mean the Beam 2gen and the Arc will play media encoded with AAC 5.1 audio as Multichannel PCM?

Hope someone can clear this up for me.

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Best answer by mjeshurun 4 May 2022, 10:49

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2 replies

Userlevel 7

How exactly are you playing the AAC 5.1 files?

The Arc and Beam (Gen 2) doesn’t support AAC 5.1 so you would need to convert the file to LPCM to get multichannel PCM audio.

Hi @GuitarSuperstar , thank you for your reply.

I’m using a streaming service that encodes its media in AAC 5.1.

I temporarily found a way to convert the audio on the fly from AAC to AC3 using Kodi, but utilizing this method means I cannot use the service’s official TV app.

It would have been nice if Sonos could support AAC 5.1, but I guess I’ll need to be satisfied with this solution for the time being.