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Hi, I’ve seen a few questions pretty close to this but I’m a total novice and they weren’t super clear to me.

I’m designing a new home theater experience and I’m looking to set up a projector. I think most of the time I’ll be streaming movies from Netflix or hbo or something so I want to equip the projector with a streaming stick, probably amazon fire. And to get surround sound I’m going to use the beam or arc.

My understanding is that in order to use a projector with sonos I need an hdmi matrix. In layman’s terms I guess it is the equipment that allows me to feed in the source material and split out audio to one device and split out video to another device. In my case it would split to a projector and sonos beam.

Where I’m getting lost is how I get a fire stick involved to watch streaming content. Can I also plug it into the hdmi matrix?

And a couple really stupid questions… 1) if I have an hdmi matrix, I need to physically run a cable to both the projector and the beam, correct? 2) is all streaming content capable of surround sound with the Dino’s 5.1 setup? 3) is atmos a form of stereo?

 

thanks in advance

  1. Yes, although it’s not 100% clear, at least to me, what you mean by a matrix, which I suspect is a difference between our versions of English. I’d call it a switch, and would ask that you ensure that it has an optical output on it. The optical cable would go from this switch/matrix to the adapter that came with the Beam.
  2. No. A lot of video content uses a Dolby Digital signal, which carries surround information, but some is stereo only, which has no surround information. The Beam (and the optical cable) is restricted to Dolby Digital, so streams that are in DTS, Dolby Digital Plus, or other codecs will not be interpreted by the Beam
  3. No, Atmos is a form of something like 35.2 or 14.2, I’m too lazy to go look it up on Wikipedia at this hour. The only device that Sonos has that can interpret Dolby Atmos is the Arc, which gives you effectively a 7.1 signal, using 5 speakers in the Arc, 2 surround speakers, and the Sub. The Beam does not have the capability of interpreting a Dolby Atmos signal, which requires a Dolby Digital Plus or TrueHD signal. 

Hi Bruce,

yes you’re right, I meant hdmi switch. So if I had an hdmi switch, would I plug the fire tv stick directly into the switch and then plug the projector and beam also into the switch?

Sure. The Firestick would go into an HDMI input, and the TV would connect to the HDMI out port, and the optical cable would go from the optical out to the adapter that came with the Beam and the adapter would plug in to the Beam.

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