First, I'm sorry if I've sounded abrasive at times. I really appreciate your products, and currently own Beam and Sub. That's an investment already, and I've had nothing but the words of praise for the quality of the sound. And the app is very convenient. Not so much for the ease of use.
I'm going to journal a few issues I've had, that could have been avoided. With all of these done, I can use the system, but this involved a lot of workarounds. Sonos is famed for "just works" principle. HT setups are not "just works" for a lot of people.
- PCM over optical/ARC works well, but Dolby Digital causes lag on a lot of TVs. Workaround: Get an HDMI extractor. Solution worked. All audio is in sync now. Downsides:- -- A) I have to manually switch cables if I want to switch from my PC to Chromecast or Xbox.--- B)Additional piece of hardware is now cluttering up the area behind my TV, and I need one more power outlet for the AC/DC adaptor for the extractor.
- Only Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC3) is supported for surround sound. This is an issue for people with a preexisting catalog of content in DTS. Solution: Use chromecast with plex to transcode audio.
- PCs output uncompressed LPCM sound via HDMI. HDMI ARC does not support 5.1 or 7.1 LPCM, but eARC does. That however again requires a TV with eARC support. Solution: I bought a second-hand external ASUS USB soundcard that supports Dolby Digital Live. The problem is solved if I manually connect optical cable to the sound card. But we come again to manually shifting cables. Additionally, there are almost no modern soundcards (external, internal, integrated, whatever) that still have Dolby Digital Live encoding support. The Asus U7 I bought has only BETA driver for dolby digital live under windows 10. There's a good chance even that support may be removed with a windows update. A few soundcards I checked don't even have DDL under windows 10 anymore, but do support it under Windows XP, Vista and 7.
Also, I suggested via Twitter (and had a prompt response from Sonos, Kudos!) to make a USB dongle for PCs that would allow wireless, real-time 5.1 sound without using optical connection. Imagine the joy of PC gamers! 🙂