Sonos Beam with Blu ray that output DTS

DTS does not work well on Sonos. You will have problems with DTS from DVD as well. Sonos does not support DTS. Just Dolby Digital 5.1

You need to get a Blu-ray player that can decode DTS to DD5.1 on the fly, do a search on here.
Apparently you are a rare user, and sonos says you should be streaming stuff as no streaming service uses DTS.....

Paulw123 wrote:

You need to get a Blu-ray player that can decode DTS to DD5.1 on the fly, do a search on here.
Apparently you are a rare user, and sonos says you should be streaming stuff as no streaming service uses DTS.....

Sonos isn't telling people how they should consume TV content. They've done their research to determine how most people listen to audio through the TV and designed their HT around that. Quite a few people are disappointed with the results, but that is very much different than some implication that Sonos is somehow trying to dictate how customers use their TVs.

Paulw123 wrote:

You need to get a Blu-ray player that can decode DTS to DD5.1 on the fly, do a search on here.
Apparently you are a rare user, and sonos says you should be streaming stuff as no streaming service uses DTS.....

Not sure how rare none DTS Blu-ray are! I'll do a search for 4K Blu-ray players that decode DTS to DD5.1 as no point in getting a standard Blu-ray these days....

You have an Xbox One (S or X?). That will decode DTS to DD 5.1 on the fly.

"Sonos isn't telling people how they should consume TV content."

Well yeah that would be some sort of dictatorship, maybe in Korea or China ;)

"They've done their research to determine how most people listen to audio through the TV and designed their HT around that."

Really, or is it just convenient marketing that streaming services don't use DTS, and really they didn't want to pay the licence fee for DTS back when the Playbar was released?
Did they really know what codecs Netflix & Amazon would use all those years ago?

Xbox one S will future proof you for 4K discs and DTS as well.

Paulw123 wrote:

"Sonos isn't telling people how they should consume TV content."

Well yeah that would be some sort of dictatorship, maybe in Korea or China ;)

Well then I'm not sure why you said as much.

Paulw123 wrote:

"They've done their research to determine how most people listen to audio through the TV and designed their HT around that."

Really, or is it just convenient marketing that streaming services don't use DTS, and really they didn't want to pay the licence fee for DTS back when the Playbar was released?
Did they really know what codecs Netflix & Amazon would use all those years ago?

I am repeating what Sonos has stated as their reason for supporting DD 5.1 and not DTS. I have no idea what the stats are, what the licence fee for DTS is, or how that would impact the sale price of the units, etc, etc. I honestly don't think fees for DTS is the reason, at least not by itself.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that Sonos' publicly provided reasoning is true, but only partially so. If you look at the history of Sonos other decisions on what they do and don't support, there is a pattern of sticking to principles for the most part.

- The choose not to support Bluetooth even though it's commonly accepted, because they saw limitations in the technology. They wanted it to be wifi so that they could get a better audio quality.

- While other companies are using IR to control TVs, which really has no standards, they chose to control TV through CEC, which is a standard. As we've seen, not all TVs choose to follow the CEC standards to the letter, but Sonos is sticking to the principle.

- And when it comes to codecs, I would not be surprised if principles were part of the motivation for only supporting DD 5.1. They saw that codecs/standards were always chosen and the chose to pick just one and push for that to be the standard going forward. It is somewhat of a trap that there are so many different standards out there that are always changing, which doesn't make it easier on the customer.

You can see it in a lot of decisions that Sonos makes. I do have respect for these principled decisions, but I also think there needs to be a bit more room for understanding that it's not always going to be prefect. I'd rather see Sonos be a little more flexible in certain areas, and they have done so. You could argue that allow direct control for music service apps, airplay 2 support, and the planned support of multiple voice assistants as a sign of that.

I'd also say that sticking to your principles works a lot better when you control a huge share of the market. I think Apple is a great example of that. In the 80s/90s Apple stuck to principles when keeping the Mac a closed system, and ended up losing to Microsoft. When the iPod and iPhone came out, they still were sticking to principles and it worked as they had a superior product and much greater control over the market. I forget which iPhone release it was, but there was a time when they chose NOT to support Adobe Flash, which was used heavily in webpages a the time. The result was that developers followed Apples lead and stopped developing in Flash. They needed their pages to operate on Apple's safari.

So what would have hypothetically happened if Sonos had similar market share/power in the speaker market that Apple had back then? DTS may very well have died out in favor of one standard, DD, because content providers didn't want their content dropped because they couldn't play on Sonos speakers.

And yes, I understand that the Flash analogy isn't perfect as Flash had it's issues while DTS does not (as far as I know), the point was that principled decisions to follow standards are easier to do and more excepted when you're company controls the market.

Can anyone specifically recommend a 4K player besides the Xbox one S?

Unfortunately I have the magnavox that bestbuy sells, and obviously I’ve run into the audio problem everyone else has hat tries to play Blu-ray Discs. Seems like I can either jump through hoops buying converting devices, or I can just get the right 4K player for the job.

Don’t want an Xbox - would rather put the money towards a dedicated 4K player than gaming capabilities that I will never use.

Yesterday I disconnected my Sony UBP-X700 and replaced it with a Samsung UBD-M8500 and set the digital output to re-encode DTS to Dolby Digital. When playing a DTS Blu-ray my Sonos app now reports that my Beam is receiving DD 5.1.

I heard that Samsung is to stop making Blu-ray players so I thought I'd better act while I still could.

It sounds very good through my Beam and Sonos 1s; a lot better than it did in stereo!