Hi there,

I am new to the forums and was hoping for some advice/guidance on the best way to set up my new beam gen 2.

I appreciate this question has probably been done to death here so apologies in advance if this has been answered elsewhere. I am asking again as a lot of the answers I have found appear to relate to previous generation sonos products which I believe only had optical in and did not have HDMI in and I haven’t found any guidance specifically relating to the beam gen 2.

The issue I am having is that the TV is old (from around 2014) and from testing and googling does not appear to passthrough DD 5.1 from external devices connected by HDMI (in my case a BT freeview box and PS4 used primarily for Plex rather than gaming). The sonos app does show DD 5.1 when using the built in netflix app which appears to confirm it is the HMDI passthrough on the TV, or lack thereof, that is the issue.

A lot of the previous discussions on this suggest using an HDMI switch in order for audio to bypass the tv and go directly to the sonos beam from the external devices however the switches suggested in the past appear to use optical out to the sonos rather than HDMI as I understand earlier sonos devices had optical in and not HMDI in.

I envisage my desired setup would want to look like this (although I could be wrong here):

BT box/PS4 → switch → TV

                           |

                           → beam gen2

with all connections as HDMI.

I guess I have a couple of questions in relation to this:

1. Is there a more up to date switch that would passthrough DD 5.1 to beam gen2 via HDMI rather than optical?
2. If 1 is an option then is there any advantage to using HMDI from the switch to beam gen2 over optical?
3. The Samsung TV currently has the options to output in PCM or DTS Neo 2:5. When DTS Neo 2:5 is selected there does appear to be an improvement in sound quality to my ears (although I imagine this is largely subjective) and is much louder. When the DTS Neo option is selected the sonos app will always show output as ‘DTS Surround 5.1’ regardless of input - is there any advantage to be gained from what I am suggesting or is the quality of audio unlikely to be an enhancement beyond that achieved through the DTS Neo setting?

I understand that there is a product called HDfury Arcana which can be used where a TV does not have eARC however I am unlikely to ever play any material that has Dobly Atmos so ideally looking for a cheaper option plus the Arcana solution would also require a switch and i’d like to avoid too many additional boxes if at all possible.

My gut instinct is that there is unlikely to be any major improvement over the DTS Neo setting from the TV but the fact the sonos app does not show the output to be the same as the input from the source device is itching my brain a bit so thought I might as well ask the question.

Additional info: I do not currently have a 5.1 setup however was considering purchasing some sonos One’s to use as surrounds and the sonos sub but thought best to decide on the best way forward with regard to the beam before moving forward with any additional purchases.

Thanks for taking the time to read and all suggestions and advice are welcomed.

Thanks,

J