Sonos Beam and Bose QC headphones in Samsung TV

Set up a profile just to reply to this thread. Not being able to use Bluetooth headphones without changing a bunch of settings or unplugging a cable is a major buzzkill, and probably will lead me to return my Beam to Amazon if it’s not sorted before my 30 day return window closes.

It’s really sad that this made it out the door Sonos, y’all need to look into your user testing strategy; I don’t know how the situation of ‘I use headphones at night so I don’t keep the rest of the house up’ never entered into the picture.

This is so frustrating... got the top of the line Samsung TV and was thinking to pimp the sound with a Sonos Beam as I‘ve been really happy with all my other Sonos products.
Hope this will be fixed very soon „unplug the cable“ might be an even more annoying answer than the problem itself. That is not an acceptable solution for a company with your ambition.

Hmm strange - now when I turn on the headphones, the sound comes out through the Beam at the same time. Sigh

Thanks MikeV. It did help. One thing I noticed is when disconnecting the bluetooth headphones (turning them off), the TV defaults back to the TV speaker rather than the Optical Out. Anything that can fix this so when I turn off the headphones, it comes through the Beam automatically? I'm trying to make sure this is fool-proof (not that I'm calling my wife a fool...)

Unfortunately my Samsung Universal remote doesn’t appear to have a IR blaster. I tried the TV remote setup in the Sonos app but it did not detect the volume button push.

Just tried it - remote no longer controls volume on the beam so obviously that is way worse. Back to hdmi and plugging / unplugging the cable until there is a fix.

Thanks for the reports, everyone. We've been looking into this issue. It's caused by the way the TV handles a command the Beam sends as part of the process to issue CEC commands to the TV like "off" and "on".

I'll make sure to let the team know you're running into this and that it's causing you trouble. For now, the best solutions are to turn off CEC when you're using the headphones, or if you use them frequently, it may be to use the optical output instead of the HDMI. You'd lose the CEC controls from the Beam, but if you use the headphones a lot this may be worth it.

I would be ok with it, if Beam had ability to connect bluetooth headphones, but otherwise ???
I'll pass along this as a request too for the future.

Same issue here:
Samsung UE40MU6100
Sonos Beam via HDMI-ARC port
Tested with three headphones: Jabra Halo 2, JBL and Sony
This tv also has optical out. When the Beam is connected via Optical out, the Bluetooth connection remains stable. However, this is not the way I was hoping to use the Beam, because sometimes the internal speaker of the tv wants to add it's voice.
Most annoying to watch in the settings is the Samsung feature to have multiple audio output to internal speakers and Bluetooth, bus this option is greyed out when Anynet is on.

I suppose since I'm in the menus to change the audio output to headphones, I may as well turn off AnyNet+ too... annoying, yes, but I suppose it'll work. I still consider this to be a bug though, and that's just a workaround, IMHO.

I’m having the same issue. Tried to turn off TV autoplay in the Sonos app, but this didn’t help. It’s definitely a software issue.

I will add myself to this. Samsung Smart TV, 2 years old with one ARC port and a new Beam. The Anynet+ will not honour changing audio output when connected to the Beam via ARC. Bluetooth headphones? Connected for 3 seconds before the ARC connection resumes as the sound output and disconnects the headphones. Tested with all other audio connections, TV speaker, optical out, etc. with the same result. Turn off the Anynet+ CEC from Expert settings, all works as it should, but the Beam is no longer available as an audio output.
This is not an acceptable state of affairs, CEC is a very simple protocol that allows multiple input recognition, and support for BT headphones is as basic as changing channels. This needs a patch ASAP. The only workaround so far is to connect via optical and avoid the entire ARC ego tripping. Again headphone support is such a basic function, I am a little stunned that this was not addressed during testing! Otherwise, an excellent product, but Sonos really seems to have a thing hating on headphones!:P

I wouldn't think this is a Sonos issue to resolve honestly. The Beam is completely unaware of the headphone/Bluetooth connection going on between the TV and the headphones. It's up to the TV to understand and determine where it should be sending audio.

I'd be curious to know if the TV turns off all other audio outputs when the ARC connection is active. I might see if connecting a Bluetooth transceiver to the RCA/optical output of the TV will work without manually turning off the ARC connection. You really shouldn't have to do this, but it might be a workaround.

Sonos sent me a DM on this. They said the Beam was designed to work this way and the solution is to turn off HDMI-ARC on the tv when using headphones or unplug the cable from the Beam. Clearly not ideal - I think this should be able to be ‘fixed’ with a software update.