Sonos Arc: Lack of DTS a problem?

I’ve given this a lot of thought and, even though I’m brand new to Sonos, I think there’s a lot of Apple in their mentality, for better and worse. Both companies are clear on who they are, what they want to accomplish, and how they intend to go about it. They are willing to push the market forward with new technologies and ways to enhance the user experience, but are ruthless in ditching (or simply never supporting) features that they feel don’t support their core mission regardless of how a vocal minority of their fans may feel about it. 

While we home theater fanboys (and fangirls) would greatly prefer for Sonos to support DTS because it rounds out the codec assortment and keeps maximum flexibility with all of our legacy stuff, Sonos quite correctly has their eyes on the disc-less, streaming future where DTS just isn’t a thing. Atmos and/or Dolby Digital Plus is, which is what the Arc very clearly expects to receive.  

Same thing with HDMI-ARC vs. eARC. They’re making a (probably correct) bet that eARC will be on a majority of TVs in the future and that that will make the Arc (and future Sonos home theater products) even easier and simpler for the average consumer to hook up quickly and have great sound. And they’re almost certainly right. We home theater fans are drawn to the Arc system for the same reasons that regular consumers will be - it looks great, it sounds great, it’s easily expandable, it’s simple to hook up, it’s simple to use, it’s simple to stream music to, etc. Even though this is my first Sonos system, I’m an immediate fan for all of those reasons and more. 

But it doesn’t do everything that we hoped that it would in order to make it a “perfect” home theater system for us (DTS support, additional HDMI ports for greater flexibility, ability to add up to 7.1.2 channels, etc.). And Sonos doesn’t care because though Arc greatly appeals to us, it’s not built for us. It’s built for the person who has no idea what DTS is. It’s built for the person who would probably never put together an AVR system in the first place. It’s built for the person who ditched DVDs (much less Blu-rays) for streaming a long time ago. It’s built for the person who wants to pull the thing out of the box, hook up two cables, and be enjoying great sound in 5 minutes. And it’s going to be absolutely perfect for those people. 

And for us enthusiasts who want all of the benefits that Arc/Sonos brings to the table but wants even more? We’ll figure out workarounds as we always do. HD Fury has already gotten orders for nearly 500 units of their Arcana adapter (https://www.hdfury.com/product/4k-arcana-18gbps/) so that users with non-eARC TVs can get full range audio out of their external devices. Which is awesome and I’m one of those pre-orderers. We’ll rip our Blu-ray collections onto hard drives and create Plex servers to serve those files up to our streaming boxes (one more thing a regular consumer would never even consider doing). And we may even buy more flexible capable equipment to make all of this work (e.g., I love my TV, but am considering augmenting with an Nvidia Shield in order to get TrueHD/Atmos from my BD rips over Plex once my Arcana arrives). 

Just my 2¢, for what it’s worth. 

I completely agree with you!! It's enthusiasts truly innovating on this front. The only thing I would say is that both Apple and Sonos, though laudable in many ways, get it seriously wrong with their closed thinking: Sonos with their refusal to adopt HDMI and stick with the antiquated optical port on the Play Bar was the equivalent of Apple refusing to support the USB port. Best of luck!

I assume you mean you’re ripping using MakeMKV and then converting using something like Handbrake (since MakeMKV doesn’t do any sort of conversion)? 

I’m in the process of doing full, non-compressed rips of my Blu-rays using MakeMKV to a large NAS as well. My primary method of viewing from there is via Plex on TV. 

In my experience, Plex (on TV at least - can’t speak for other platforms) automatically transcodes Dolby TrueHD to FLAC (Audio: Transcode (TrueHD - FLAC), and for DTS-MA, it simply (and interestingly) reads the file as “Audio: DCA” without any transcoding. From there, the Arc sees both as “Dolby Digital Plus 5.1.” 

I will be very interested to see what the result of that same test is when I get the Arcana is part of the chain. And I’m still holding out hope that a future TV or tvOS version will allow TrueHD passthrough. 

No, not converting them; Im using MKV to create BDMV containers and keeping 1:1 copies of the discs. I play these using a system called Zappiti which is amazing. However, I heard about Plex after I bought it!! Is Plex an app on AppleTV? I’ll have to check that out but not keen on buying another box.

After my FLAC tests failed, I am testing out transcoding manually using MVKToolNix and a Windows programme which extracts the DTS-HD and converts it to TrueHD. I’ve just created one test file and will try it out. TBH your solution sounds the best of a bad situation though DD5.1 not as good as DTS-HD.

I can’t speak to what Sonos has done in the past, but, if anything, the complaints on the Apple side of the tech world are usually that they’re TOO aggressive in dropping old technology in favor of something new. I’ve been an Apple user long enough to remember the uproar that happened when they dropped the old ADB ports in favor of USB for the very first iMac. And ditching the floppy drive. And then CD/DVD drives. Then the headphone jack on the iPhone / iPad. Most recently the decision to drop support for all 32 bit programs with the newest version of macOS. Next up will be dropping Intel support in favor of Apple Silicon processors. The list goes on. 

And yeah, it can be annoying, and for many it’s a bridge too far which I totally get. But, just like with the Arc / Sonos, there’s comfort in being in an ecosystem where, for the most part, everything just works. And it does what I need. And I enjoy it. And it’s beautiful and well thought out and well put together with minimal mess and fuss, even if you’re paying a premium for it. 

Again, many parallels between the two. ;-) 

Totally agree , my 12 years old Bose system is able to play DTS while the latest Arc is unable to is totally not hearing customers. I found it the hard way today while playing my Blu-ray Disc on ps3 to pass DTS via my TV and Sonos App provided a message stating they don’t support DTS And the DTS-HD MA was translated to stereo 2.0 🤷‍♂️ . I had opened another thread asking the question if I was doing it wrong but found this thread to be useful .

Hi everyone, I have managed to spend a good 100 hours on this and found a decent work around: https://en.community.sonos.com/home-theater-228993/the-definitive-dts-hd-sound-work-around-for-the-sonos-arc-6844784

My guess is there is customers that have looked into the Arc but bought something else that supports both dts and dolby. 

I wonder why Sonos don't want those customers too? 

Would it be wrong to say hey, we have everything in one Bar, quality that works with every possible scenario, but NO. stream you movies or go home says sonos

One thing we can be sure of - this is a deliberate strategy.  Presumably Sonos does not think this hits sales enough to justify any additional costs.  People have been complaining about lack of DTS support since the Playbar was launched.  Sonos still didn’t include DTS on the Beam.  Complaints continued with the Beam, they still didn’t include it on the Arc.

It seems clear that Sonos sees the future as downloads and streaming, with physical media gradually disappearing.  That puts them in the same camp as Samsung, who stopped manufacturing Blu-Ray players a couple of years back.

I don’t have the information to form a view on whether Sonos’ strategy is the right one, but if they weren’t persuaded of the case for DTS when the Playbar launched, if seems even less likely they will change that view now.

I’ve bought an arc and am moving away from disc media so for me it’s not too much of an issue. 
 

however I did by an Xbox one s to be used as a 4K blu Ray player with my LG C9 and arc because it has the ability to encode dts to DD5.1 so problem solved anyway.