Dolby Digital Plus update

I may be wrong, but I think some people are giving the Beam's handshake capabilities more credit than deserved.

In my understanding, handshake is simply a feature enabling the Beam to request supported fileformats. The Beam supports PCM and Dolby Digital but not Dolby Digital Plus.

Handshake does not mean that the Beam can downmix Dolby Digital Plus to Dolby Digital - the Beam cannot do that.

Handshake simply ensures that the TV will provide the best possible sound available that the Beam supports. Meaning that if e.g. Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital and PCM is available, the TV will send Dolby Digital to the Beam.

However, Netflix for instance does typically not include several types of audioformats in their streams. With Chromecast and most other systems, only Stereo and Dolby Digital Plus are available for Netflix.

In this case, handshake will ensure that the Beam receives the best possible, supported format being stereo (PCM).

Some people seem to be of the impressions that most TV-sets can downmix e.g. Dolby Digital Plus to Dolby Digital and that handshake will force the TV to do so.

I have yet to find a single tv-set with this feature. In any price range. I even put up a specific thread to identify any TV-sets with this feature - but was out of luck.

Except for some Blu-ray-players, Xbox/Playstation and Apple TV, TVs and streaming-boxes (including popular choices as Chromecast and Fire sticks) are not able to downmix Dolby Digital Plus or DTS on the fly.

Some build-in apps on TVs only stream in e.g. Dolby Digital and avoids the problem this way, but generally - unless you use an Apple TV, Playstation, Xbox or similar - you will not be able to get full surround from Netflix and many other streaming services from a Sonos-device - including the Beam.

This is coming from a long-term Sonos-fan owning (and having done so since their respective dates of release) each of the Playbar, Playbase and Beam.

All of them are great products, but getting the most out of them is becoming increasingly more difficult with the widespreading of unsupported file formats.

Here is hoping thay Apple will continue supporting the excellent on-the-fly converting capabilities of the Apple TV (or LG/Sony releasing a decent Oled TV-set with similar capabilities!) - cause I am sure Sonos will not be changing their strategy on this. They never did on DTS and I do not see any sign of change in terms of Dolby Digital Plus.

In my understanding, handshake is simply a feature enabling the Beam to request supported fileformats. The Beam supports PCM and Dolby Digital but not Dolby Digital Plus.

Handshake does not mean that the Beam can downmix Dolby Digital Plus to Dolby Digital - the Beam cannot do that.

Handshake simply ensures that the TV will provide the best possible sound available that the Beam supports. Meaning that if e.g. Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital and PCM is available, the TV will send Dolby Digital to the Beam.
Thank you for confirming that I'm not delusional. This is exactly how I understood it to work - and read in several other places on this community.

It requests via HDMI handshake, yes, but it does not do the conversion. If your input device cannot do that, it is up to the input device what you get: either it will revert to stereo, or still send DD5.1+ in which case you will have no sound. I don't know the standards, so not sure what the default behavior should be in that case.
The different formats of Dolby Inc. are backward-compatible, however, I think the TV set has to support the conversion.

Is Dolby Digital Plus content backward-compatible?

Because Dolby Digital Plus is built on core Dolby Digital technologies, content that is encoded with Dolby Digital Plus is fully compatible with the millions of existing home theaters and playback systems worldwide equipped for Dolby Digital playback. Dolby Digital Plus soundtracks are easily converted to a 640 kbps Dolby Digital signal without decoding and reencoding, for output via S/PDIF. The 640 kbps bit rate, which is higher than the standard 448 kbps used on DVDs, is fully compatible with all existing Dolby Digital decoding products such as A/V receivers, and can provide higher-than-DVD quality from Dolby Digital Plus soundtracks when played back through existing systems.

https://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/Assets/US/Doc/Professional/dolby-digital-plus-faq.pdf

Hola
Yo creo que no hace falta Más, si lo que quieres es una barra de sonido. Sonos tiene el mejor decodificador de audio del mercado. Si quieres más tendras que comprar varios altavoces independientes y conectarlos a un amplificador av compatible con los ultimos formatos de audio.

Hola
Yo creo que no hace falta Más, si lo que quieres es una barra de sonido. Sonos tiene el mejor decodificador de audio del mercado. Si quieres más tendras que comprar varios altavoces independientes y conectarlos a un amplificador av compatible con los ultimos formatos de audio.

code:

I think you do not need More, if what you want is a sound bar. Sonos has the best audio decoder in the market. If you want more you will have to buy several independent speakers and connect them to an av amplifier compatible with the latest audio formats.

(sorry, I can't reply in Spanish)
For DTS, Dolby Atmos and the like, I agree. However, DD+ can now be found on streaming services, and Sonos has always been the Champion of streaming. It's likely they did not see this coming, because when the Playbar was released in 2013 and even now, for regular broadcast TV, DD 5.1 was and is the de-facto standard and they might have expected it to be for streaming as well.
Most modern TV's will be able to do the transcoding, but native support would be good for instance when streamed over Chromecast.


The different formats of Dolby Inc. are backward-compatible, however, I think the TV set has to support the conversion.

I understand the backwards compatibility, but the above is exactly what I meant. You still need a device that is capable to extract the DD "core" out of the DD+ stream. It's not like a non-DD+ device like the Beam will be able to just use the DD core and ignore the rest. It is of course true, that to comply correctly with the standard and the backwards compatibility described in it, a transcoding device should always deliver DD to the Beam when fed DD+ instead of reverting to stereo, so that may have been an oversight in my original post.

Like all Sonos A/V products, the Beam only has the capability to process DD 5.1, nothing more. Any sort of transcoding, or extraction in the case of DD+ cannot be done by the Sonos hardware. And as mentioned a above, a "handshake" is just two devices communicating on what they can and cannot do, it does not magically grant the ability to transcode anything.

Most TVs output Dolby Digital. Check the output settings on the tv and select Dolby Digital. DTS or non-lossy formats won’t be possible to output from TVs until eARC becomes a standard with TVs and ancillary devices.

I have Netflix and its in surround. I have a Sonos surround Setup too.

Please enlighten us all on how.
What device are you using to watch Netflix? If it is an app on your TV, there's a good chance that the TV is feeding DD 5.1 to Sonos. If not, then I'd like to know how you've managed to convert the DD+ from Netflix to the DD 5.1 that Sonos needs.

Otherwise, I would ask you to confirm through Settings > About my Sonos system, that the audio is actually Dolby Digital 5.1 and that you're not actually listening to simulated surround from a stereo source, because I think it has been made abundantly clear that Sonos does not do DD+ on its own.

I stream Netflix through my Roku which is connect HDMI to the Samsung TV and then it goes from the TV optically to the Playbar. I do Have 5.1 surround confirmed also. I have a Samsung BluRay player that i can play DTS Blu rays in surround also. I had to go into the settings on the player and set it to convert the data from DTS or Plus to Dolby Digital... it sounds great. But I had to make sure i bought a player that would do that.