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.

If you mean you don't have a Sub for the '.1', no audio is discarded. So if the 5.1 signal is coming in, all channels are used to the best of the capabilities of what you've got set up.

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.New models of LG Oled transcoding DD, DD+ and HE-AAC to DD output signal, so 5.1 should be played when watching netflix or other streaming services. I have asked to LG how new models are going to deal with atmos.

https://www.lg.com/ca_en/support/product-help/CT20098005-1437136302910-others

I actually have a fairly new LG Oled and I have that exact setting.

Unfortunately, this will not make the tv transcode any inputs.

The setting simply makes the tv choose the selected format when available. So build-in apps will play in the selected format and sources supporting the selected format will be requested to provided the selected format. However if an input source does not support the selected format, e.g. a Chromecast not supporting Dolby Digital, you will not be getting the selected format but rather PCM/stereo.

Again, I have yet to see one single tv-set that actually transcodes any input signal to Dolby Digital.

So if you are a Sonos-user with a full surround set, better choose your sources carefully: Use build-in apps, an Apple TV or an Xbox/PS4 as they will be able to convert audio on the fly and allow you to continue playing in good-old DD 5.1 while the rest of the world is moving on to DTS, DD Plus, Atmos and beyond - DO NOT use a Chromecast, Firestick etc.

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.

Is it possible to buy any equipment to handle the DD+ to DD conversion, in order to get Chromecast support with full surround sound ?

You would need a device with an HDMI-input which can also convert audio to DD 5.1.

I actually did this with an old Xbox One I had laying around. It has an HDMI input and can convert any audio to DD 5.1. So by using that and watching Chromecast via the Xbox I was able to get DD 5.1. from a Chromecast…

But the solution is far from elegant and was more a proof of concept.

I think the cheapest option is unfortunately to buy a different streaming device. None of the current Chromecasts will ever be able to convert any fileformat as they are just streaming-sticks. And I would certainly not put my money on Sonos suddenly enabling DD+ on any of their current gear (although I guess the Beam and the AMP would have the hardware for it).

 

The cheapest solution at this stage is getting an Apple TV. I must say that I am very pleased with my Apple TV 4K. There are almost no issues and there are a lot of possibilities in terms of adjusting both sound- and video output.

 

There are apps for all the major streaming service you need and if you prefer casting rather than using a remote or Siri, you can always airplay.

 

Another benefit of the Apple TV and Sonos is that you can airplay sound from the Apple TV to any (newish) Sonos speaker without wiring.

 

When using ARC it will do the handshake to request the proper signal and then facilitate the downmix.

It would be purely up to the input device for DTS as it needs to be transcoded into DD, and if that is not possible then it will either output no sound or stereo.

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.

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.

This thread is extremely helpful. I recently discovered that my Sonos Playbar was receiving a stereo signal from all the apps on my LG OLED B7 which wasn't immediately obviously because of virtual surround. The TVs documentation is very unclear and originally led me to the conclusion that it would transcode to 5.1 from multiple higher res formats on the fly but the tldr seems to be that the source needs to output Dolby Digital for this to work with everything else falling back to Stereo. Xbox One can be set to output Dolby Digital whereas Chromecast just passed through whatever the app sends natively. The one source that's worked for me is the Firestick Ultra which can also be forced to output Dolby Digital but this still only appears to work for Amazon content with the other apps coming through as Dolby Digital 2.0. 

 

Practically speaking, the Playbar isn't really a surround sound system anymore except for extremely specific scenarios. 

 

 

Hi, thanks to everyone who posted on this thread, it’s helped me a lot with frustrations on my living room setup which I have now gotten working with DD5.1. When I plug the HDMI into my TV inputs and the optical out into the Playbar from the TV, I’d only get stereo (as many of you have with TV optical outs). 

The LG streaming apps provide Dolby Digital 5.1 to my Playbar via optical, but my TV is 4+ years old now, and the apps suck on LG to begin with, not to mention that they haven’t aged well, freeze and limited options.  Also any HDMI being fed into my TV would get stepped down to stereo when playing on the Playbar . I tried initially to plug the Chromecast U into a KanexPro 18 gbps splitter and then feed the signal to my Playbar and TV from there, that didn’t work though as the Playbar would only register the audio signal if I togged the KanexPro to stereo output and away from Bitstream, which left me back at square one.  Given the age of my TV and in my opinion the terrible UI, I read the NVIDIA Shield that came out in Oct 2019 had the ability to send DD 5.1 signals out which I hoped my Playbar would read.  The Shield isn’t the cheapest option but the UI in my opinion is fantastic and its functionally replaced my TV UI now as I can use the Shield for everything.  So I ditched the Chromecast U, and plugged the Shield into the KanexPro and then to TV and the playbar.  Initially it looks like the issue wasn’t fixed, but going into the audio settings, you can manually toggle every audio output (All the common Dolbys and DTS).  So I manually enabled DD 5.1 and also enabled upmixing to 5.1 on the device and disabled DD+, DTS, TrueHD, etc).  Now everything coming through is DD 5.1 and the common streaming apps (Netflix, Prime, etc), all have the video streaming 4K to the TV and 5.1 audio to the Playbar.  

I spent more money than I would’ve liked, the Shield in Canada was $160 and the KanexPro $120 but to have a surround Sonos living room setup that gives proper surround again has been worth it for me.

 

I hope this helps some folks, and Sonos, please take note, I went through a lot of headaches after spending a lot of money on my equipment.  Why an investment of this magnitude has me fiddling with finding a legacy handshake to get the benefit out of my system is really stupid.  All Dolby/DTS should just work with your devices given the cost.  

I mean I have no sub connected and it still says 5.1 dobly... in the Sonos setting under about my sonos

This thread is extremely helpful. I recently discovered that my Sonos Playbar was receiving a stereo signal from all the apps on my LG OLED B7 which wasn't immediately obviously because of virtual surround. The TVs documentation is very unclear and originally led me to the conclusion that it would transcode to 5.1 from multiple higher res formats on the fly but the tldr seems to be that the source needs to output Dolby Digital for this to work with everything else falling back to Stereo. Xbox One can be set to output Dolby Digital whereas Chromecast just passed through whatever the app sends natively. The one source that's worked for me is the Firestick Ultra which can also be forced to output Dolby Digital but this still only appears to work for Amazon content with the other apps coming through as Dolby Digital 2.0. 

 

Practically speaking, the Playbar isn't really a surround sound system anymore except for extremely specific scenarios. 

 

 

Hello,

Who is making the virtual surround and with what setting?

The beam or the LG TV?