Sonos Arc 5.1 Setup - PC Gaming LPCM

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After looking through Sonos’ forums and other internet corners (AV forums, Reddit), I still haven’t quite confirmed whether or not it would be possible to achieve a 5.1 setup with Sonos using the Arc + 2x Ones + Sub for PC gaming on a LG CX.

Some posts hint at this being a possibility, but I’d prefer to confirm that it works before I invest more into Sonos’ ecosystem.

Does anyone have this setup and can confirm that for PC gaming specifically, you’re able to get sound out through all of the devices satisfactorily?

Bonus question: has anyone replaced their Sonos Sub in this configuration with the Amp + third party (SVS) dedicated sub?

Appreciate any confirmation/guidance that you might provide!

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Corry PAnswer

Sonos Staff

Hi @the_jsg

You’ll find that you’ll need the device supplying the game audio to encode to Dolby Digital in real-time.

Although some Sound Cards allow this (Creative have a feature called Dolby Digital Live), it’s likely that your graphics card is in fact supplying audio via HDMI. I don’t know of any graphics cards that support live encoding of Dolby Digital, but there is a hack that can achieve it. It’s not overly user-friendly. This post has some more information:

If you use only the PC (and don’t watch TV), you could connect the Arc via optical directly to a sound card delivering Dolby Digital Live without the need to hack drivers. If you do anything on the TV other than use it as a PC monitor, however, this would get annoying quickly.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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E

enowai

Lyricist I

Reading this thread has left me confused; I’ve had very different experience. Enabling LPCM 5.1 was actually the easiest part of my struggles, as my ultimate goal was Dolby Atmos.

Getting LPCM 5.1 to the Sonos Arc with just a PC and TV, you’ll need the TV to be configured for eARC enabled, Passthrough and for HDMI Audio Input to be set to PCM. At this point, speaker setup for NVIDIA Audio will show you only Stereo as an option. That’s because the EDID info communicated from the TV is saying it only supports that, but LG announced it is able to do LPCM passthrough (so, not sure what’s going on there). You need “Custom Resolution Utility” (CRU) to edit the “Extension Block → Audio Formats → LPCM” channels (currently, you’ll see it’s set to 2). Up it to 6 (5.1), restart the PC and you’ll see 5.1 now available as a speaker setup option. That’s it.

Now Atmos is the real problem. For that, you need to purchase Dolby Access, and change the TV’s HDMI Audio Input back to Bitstream. Change the speaker setup to the “Dolby Atmos for home theater” option, and you should be good to go, according to some CX owners I’ve spoken with.

However, I have a B9 and have had audio drops constantly when Atmos speaker setup is enabled, even with non Atmos content coming across as Dolby Multichannel PCM. I tried everything, and determined dropping refresh rate helps in certain instances, but ultimately, there’s either a problem with B9 passthrough or my specific unit.

I ended up getting the HD Fury Arcana, and having two HDMI out from the NVIDIA GPU; one for 120Hz, G-SYNC enabled display experience straight to the TV, and the other going to the Fury, which has its audio out to the Sonos Arc. I have no audio drops now with any Dolby format.

Really sad Sonos decided to make Arc incompatible with standard HDMI output devices (leaving the Fury as the only option, which is eARC capable), though I have a sneaking suspicion it could be fixed with firmware (have a “PC” mode or something).

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