I have a new Beam and I’m trying to connect it to my PC via the HDMI optical output adapter, however my Sonos app doesn’t recognize the PC as a TV properly.

My PC specs: MSI MAC x570 Tomahawk motherboard with an onoard audio card: Realtek ALC-1200A, and 1x Optical S/PDIF Out.

My situation right now: I connected the beam to the motherboard via the optical output adapter. I’ve come as far as the PC recognizing the beam as an external speaker (that took a loooong time). I can control the volume of the beam via the windows sound control. While it’s connected to the PC, the Sonos app on my mobile will say, that the sound is playing on a TV. However when I try the setup ‘connect the Beam to a TV’ (my PC) via the Sonos app on my mobile phone, it tells me that it can’t find any HDMI-Arc connections.

The Audio output adapter on my windows is the “Realtek digital output”. I’ve tried various versions of the drivers - old and new ones. Right now I’m runnig the current system. (with various other versions the Beam wasn’t even recognized as a speaker, so I was beginning to think that something might be wrong with the cable, which, however is obviously not the case). I have it set to 2 channels, 16bit, 48000Hz (also tried the lowest settings to no avail), dolby digital output (when i do the windows test I can hear sound on the Beam and my two surround One SLs), also tried various other combinations of audio output, however I didn’t hear any sound with DTS audio and Windows WMA Pro Audio, so I disabled those. I have the Realtek HD Audio Manager app, but changing the settings doesn’t make the app recognize the PC.

So I spent many hours searching the internet for ways to solve the issue and installed and deleted the Realtek drivers countless times. As I said- I did manage to get it to work as a speaker, which I’m pretty happy about, but it would be nice to get the app to work properly also.

Is it “supposed to be” like that? Like is that as good as it gets with a PC? Or is there a way to set it up properly? Cheers.

Amongst others, these threads were somewhat helpful:

German: https://de.community.sonos.com/installation-und-nutzung-223378/sonos-beam-und-pc-sound-6743592