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Hi everyone, after searching high and low, I managed to set up the Sonos Arc as part of a 5.1 system to play perfect with the OLED65B9PLA and also using the Zappiti HDR 4K Pro as a player. I thought to share these settings with any Google searchers.

OLED65B9PLA Settings

Connect the Arc using the cable included to HDMI 2, which is the eArc port. Turn the Arc on.

The TV should, itself, now output sound to the Arc. Go to sound settings on the TV and under the sound output options for external speaker, select Passthrough (which will send the signal without any decoding from the device you are playing from, in this case the Zappiti, to the Arc). Also turn on eArc.

In the more sound options, you can also set sound input for the device connected to each HDMI port. I have set all these to bitstream.

With these settings, using the TV:

  • You should be able to play any sound from any app on the TV itself perfectly. Try Atmos from Netflix, it should show up on the Sonos app properly, or even from the Apple TV app.
  • You should be able to play DD+, DD, TrueHD or Atmos from any connected device providing you have set up the sound out correctly on that device.

Zappiti 4K

This is a great device and I have used it since ditching discs; I populated my content using MakeMKV/Xmedia. I have connected this to HDMI1 and use it to play most my content. I have used it for DD+, DD, TrueHD and Atmos (TrueHD); all work perfect.

Anyway, the options are really simple. In sound, set HDMI sound to RAW, not auto. Auto provides very mixed results in terms of sound output. RAW always delivers the right sound to the TV which just passes through to the Arc.

The other options are not relevant; I have no idea what HMDI Rx is for but it appears to make no difference to sound on the eARC port.

With regards to LPCM, I thought I had to change the setting to output LPCM and wasted hours figuring why it didn't work. In summary, Zappiti does not transcode anything, so you cant (for example) output DTS-HD as LPCM and then play it on the Arc :laughing: Sorry, I thought you could :laughing: Anyway, what you have to do is create an LPCM track for the film and then simply output it as RAW (it as above) and it plays perfect.

Put another way, Zappiti sends LPCM to the Arc to play perfectly, but there actually has to be an LPCM track on the video to send. Sound options stay as RAW whatever you are playing.

 

Hope this helps someone!!

Hi @Evander 

Good to hear you are enjoying your Arc!

Thanks for your post - I’m sure someone will find it useful, or have some other insights to share!

Interesting piece of kit - I hadn’t heard of it until now. I am surprised to hear it doesn’t transcode audio, however.

Hi thanks! Zappiti doesn’t transcode (probably because of licensing etc) but it can downsample HD audio to SD audio but only DTS-HD to DTS; DD+/TrueHD to DD, not across the platforms.

Hi thanks! Zappiti doesn’t transcode (probably because of licensing etc) but it can downsample HD audio to SD audio but only DTS-HD to DTS; DD+/TrueHD to DD, not across the platforms.

Ah - so it does help out somewhat. You’re probably right - licencing.

How does the size of a LPCM track compare to the size of the original DTS-HD track? Or, how does the whole movie file size compare when it has a LPCM track instead of DTS-HD?

Hi thanks! Zappiti doesn’t transcode (probably because of licensing etc) but it can downsample HD audio to SD audio but only DTS-HD to DTS; DD+/TrueHD to DD, not across the platforms.

Ah - so it does help out somewhat. You’re probably right - licencing.

How does the size of a LPCM track compare to the size of the original DTS-HD track? Or, how does the whole movie file size compare when it has a LPCM track instead of DTS-HD?

the track is roughly double, LPCM to DTS-HD. I'm fact, I am just ripping a Blu-ray Disc now and the DTS-HD is 3,577kbps and LPCM is 6,912kbps. In terms of file size, tbh, when you're dealing with mkv files which are 10gb an hour, the size difference is acceptable. I use LPCM as the primary track and also retain the original DTS-HD track as the secondary track so Im basically adding c. 2.1Gb to a 11Gb file. If I just used E-AC3 (DD+) it would be adding about 250Mb. Its a big size difference between the formats for sure but relative to overall file size, its about 15%.

Great answer - I assumed it would be bigger, but not sure by how much. When compared to a 30GB file overall, I guess it’s not too bad. Of course, once you’ve done it to 100 movies, that 200GB extra space needed - enough for a few more movies.

Having said that, I’ve saved more space than that by formatting my drives (linux/ext4) to not expect more than a thousand files or so (a lot of space is reserved for cataloguing 100,000s of expected files, but if you know there’ll never be that many, you can override it during formatting). I forget how I did this, but if anyone is interested I’ll be happy to look it up.

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