Multichannel PCM 5.1 dropping out since 14.10 update

Is it just me or has it gotten much worse in the past month?

I used to be able to make the problem go away by playing around with the settings a few minutes and it would work until a power cycle happened (for example an electric blackout).

But since the past few weeks even fiddling around for hours doesn’t fix it anymore. I know there were some software updates on the TV (dunno if on Sonos) and it seems they’ve made it much worse now, and I can no longer make the problem disappear…

It’s not like this is the only problem the Beam 2 has either. The loud “pops” when using Atmos on the Xbox Series X are equally annoying.

I got the issue to disappear for a week by unplugging HDMI 1 lol. Issue appeared again, I’ve been tinkering for the past 2 hours, no luck. This product isn’t worth the hassle.

Idk if I’d even recommend Atmos for gaming on the Xbox on any audio system. It adds delay to the audio, at least it did as of a few months ago. I can’t comment on media apps though.

Unfortunately I have a Sonos ecosystem with 2 Ones and the beam 2, since they worked well with my previous TV. If it were just the beam I would’ve replaced it but I’m kinda stuck with it. Planned on buying the bass speaker but no way I’m gonna buy another Sonos product as it stands now.

Once I got the bug, I was never able to make it work again on any of my devices. Toggled all the settings suggested but no dice. From time to time, I would randomly test again (but without changing settings) and it just never worked. But I guess it’s pointless even if it did if it’ll just randomly bug out again.

This was supposed to be my gateway into the Sonos ecosystem. But even if this gets fixed now, I’ve been convinced to make it my first and last Sonos product. Disasterclass performance from the support staff. Customers have refunded and have been turned away. Hopefully this thread can at least save prospective buyers.

Just got off the phone with Sonos Europe tech support (over one hour call). I sent them the diagnostics and described the issue including all of the steps to reproduce it, faulty setup and everything everyone mentioned on the thread to solve it. I also gave them the link to this thread and asked that the support staff comment on it. He could not (obviously) help me solve the issue but he escalated it to L2 and they will look into it. I explained how frustrating it is that such a high end premium product performs so poorly, and how bad the lack of support and acknowledgment on their side is. I made them promise to respond in this thread to keep the community in the loop as they’re working to fix this issue, and keep me updated on the case.

Having had experiences with customer service before I cannot guarantee this will help in any way and this issue will actually get fixed, but at least it’s something, and maybe it’ll be the spark that will make them look more seriously into it.

So I noticed an odd thing just now that may be important:

When I’m on my ps5 and audio is playing, I turn on my Apple TV (without switching to its source) and the moment it turns on, the audio cuts, just as it does regularly. It returns moments later.

I have tested it several times and it’s consistent. I’m beginning to think that there’s some device trying to “reconnect” or turn on or do some kind of polling in sleep mode every minute or so, and this “draws the attention” of the TV, causing the audio to stop.

Definitely seems like it could be related to CEC.

Hi all,

I highly recommend that anyone looking for this issue to be resolved get in touch with our technical support team to have your case sorted out. While we of course forward any and all information from the community here, it will help us all if you ‘officially’ create a case with our support engineers.
Please don't expect an immediate resolution, but each case will add further information that could help us get a resolution in place.

I’ve been thinking this through a bit more this week with regards to isolating the issue. The problem is that I can’t observe what’s going on in the HDMI link between Beam2 and the TV:

• each HDMI cable seems to be an independently negotiated peer to peer connection
• the TV (dynamically) decides what EDID to present to its sources depending on the capabilities described in the EDIDs it receives from its sinks - this can cause screens to blank as it involves video modes
• CEC creates an addressable network across the individual HDMI cable links - it might be possible to sniff the whole conversation on a free port?
• eARC capabilities seem to be exchanged over the eARC CDC once the main HDMI EDIDs have agreed eARC is available. 
• 11111 on LG TV shows the HDMI link stats on the active input port, would be helpful if there was a port selector on this view to see what’s going on with the eARC port
• I haven’t identified any consumer level test equipment that displays eARC activity, it’s focused on the main video pins and CEC. Inserting something like an HDFURY inline may even “fix” the issue due to EDID or h/w proxying, so the faulty behaviour might never be observable. Only the TV or Beam2 internal logs would really help here. The HDFURY would show if the HDMI video link was collapsing, but probably not if the eARC link was re-handshaking (might account for the 1 second delay and the audio recovering)

I did try putting one of those CEC breaker dongles between the TV and Beam2 to try to isolate CEC from the equation (because the TV alway re-enables CEC when I switch it off because it knows the Beam is connected, but technically CEC isn’t actually required) but it just blocked eARC/ARC and froze the remote control function :(.

Did you try your ATV test without the Beam, if the audio drops when using TV speakers, then can probably eliminate that?

I also observed yesterday that ATV4k gen 3 on HDMI1 was not bugged (I haven’t managed to trigger the bug on this device at all yet), but PS5 on HDMI3 was bugged. I could flick between the two ports without the behaviour changing. This (and some of the temporary fix actions) still makes me think this is something to do with the persistence of EDID/eARC discovery inside the TV.

The other thing I noticed (based on one of the posts on another forum) was that pausing the source material doesn’t change the 59s interval, even though the Beam2 notes the change in audio format during the pause.