Three Issues

Hi @DrFresh01, thank you for reaching out to us and welcome to the Sonos Community. I appreciate you for providing us with a detailed concern and let me help you figure out what's happening.

I have a few questions and will give some suggestions on what you can follow.

• What available audio formats do you see on your LG TV when the HDMI cable is connected to the eARC port?
• Apple TV 4K does not output Dolby Digital Plus ( Atmos) signals natively. Have you tried changing the output on the Apple TV to Dolby Digital 5.1?
  • Settings-> Video & Audio -> Audio Format -> Change Format -> set to On , then set new format to Dolby Digital 5.1

You may also check this article from Apple's support page, Apple TV 4K uses a high bandwidth form of Dolby Atmos that doesn’t work over ARC connections.

Let me also share these threads that may be helpful for you.

https://en.community.sonos.com/troubleshooting-228999/no-dialog-through-arc-from-apple-tv-4k-6847888

https://en.community.sonos.com/home-theater-228993/did-ios14-tvos14-quietly-bring-atmos-audio-to-airplay-2-6848270

You don't need to reset your system to switch to the WiFi network. If there's a change in the network like a new router or new WiFi name and password, your Sonos devices don't recognize the network. To reassociate your Sonos speakers to your network, you need an ethernet cable to temporarily wire a speaker to your router and run the wireless setup to register your Sonos to your WiFi network. You can remove the ethernet cable once done.

Here are the Sonos Products that support 5GHz 

• One
• One SL
• Port
• Five
• Sub (Gen 3)
• Move

I'd appreciate it if you can submit a diagnostic report to understand how your system is functioning and to check what's going to further assist you with this.

If you need help with any other information, please be sure to let us know.

We'll wait for your reply.

748078100 diagnostic report number

Hi @DrFresh01, thank you for your reply and for posting the diagnostic report. Let me help you with this.

Upon checking the diagnostic, I see that you have a 5.1 home theater connected to your WiFi network and I don't see any issue with your current setup.

The Sonos Arc doesn't support McLPCM and the Apple TV 4K does not output Dolby Digital Plus (Atmos) signals natively. You may need to check out Apple's support article about this.

We plan to support Uncompressed McLPCM in a future software update. We don’t have exact timing to share at this point and will update this thread when we do.

Please let us know if there’s anything else we can assist you with. We and the community are always here.

Hi there,

  I understand that Sonos is not currently supporting McLPCM, however this has created a tremendous headache for all of us who use any streaming device that does not convert all outputted content to either Dolby Digital or DD Plus.

  The five most popular streaming devices, second to laptops, desktops and mobile devices are Roku, Google Chromecast, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Nvidia Shield.

ALL of these devices not only support McLPCM but they also stream certain content exclusively in that format.  Movies from the Google Play store are an excellent example.  Apple has a mixed approach to their content delivery and it is ludicrous for any of us to pay 2K to 2.5K for a supposedly top of the line soundbar with subwoofer and rear surround speakers to either be limited to stereo PCM or no sound at all.  

It far too often occurs that when the Arc receives an McLPCM stream it may simply interpret it as silence delivered via PCM 2.0.  This then requires constant fiddling with cables and power cycles of all devices to get the sync in harmony again.

Let me be blunt here.  SONOS is the ONLY part of the device chain that does not support McLPCM.  And by the way I am only using this “Mc”LPCM abbreviation because you referred to it as such.  The correct way to referenced it is either as LPCM or Multichannel LPCM / PCM.  I mention this only for the sake of people being able to find relevant information when they do a search online.  McLPCM won’t bring up anything of relevance (or at all) in a google search for example.

Now here is where I am personally irritated (as a customer who has purchased two of these complete systems with very high confidence in SONOS).  I’ve invested just over 5 thousand USD for these two systems and despite having the latest LG OLED TVs with eARC, I am still handicapped by the most annoying of omissions.

Further to that there is NO reason of any meaningful sort to delay adding the feature quickly.  You are already doing 99.9% of the work to relay multichannel PCM to the various speakers after decoding of Dolby Digital Plus / Atmos.  

There are NO licensing fees or patents governing PCM or LPCM (multi-channel or not).  So it’s not a matter of cost, such as it would be for us to ask for DTS.  Which none of us have because it’s entirely ancillary and Dolby Digital / Dolby Atmos has become far more prevalent.

That said LPCM CANNOT be ignored.

Look… LG has already released multiple firmware updates for their TVs from 2019 and 2020 to support proper LPCM management and relay over ARC and eARC.  And typically companies like LG and Samsung (as an example) are rather slow to push out such updates.  (I know because I’ve worked at / with both.)  But this was a matter that clearly had priority.

Thus, I beseech you.  Please, do not keep us in the dark on WHEN this update is to be released.  We honestly deserve status updates, because frankly we have already invested (in good faith) in your product.  It is a minimal ask.  Or, if it’s just impossible then Sonos should be prepared and willing to receive all units sold this year back from any customer who wishes to move to any other brand or model of hardware that can and does support the Multi Channel LPCM format.

So, what’s the response to be?  Please do not respond with “I cannot comment, we cannot comment, or we will let you know when it happens.”  It breeds bad faith and the rest of the electronics and media industry is not going to bend to the will of Sonos and change all their device code, change their formats, just to address a simple logical omission from your core software.

A fix like this should take no more than a week quite frankly.  So lets get it done shall we?

PS:  If you are short staffed, I’d be more than happy to offer my consulting firms resources (at market price of course) to accelerate this work.  We have a myriad of talents in the technical, cloud, data analytics, enterprise business and product development spaces. Let me know, I’d just really like to see this get resolved quickly.  

Thanks,

Luca

Hi @Atomic Flip, thank you for reaching us out in the Sonos Community.

We appreciate your detailed post describing the issue and all your effort in checking this from your end. Your feedback is important to us. 

I agree that an issue must be resolved as soon as possible. In this specific scenario, we are still awaiting an update from our engineers for the development but as of this writing, we haven't received any to share with you.  

Please bear with us while our team is working towards a resolution for this.

If you need help with any other information, please be sure to let us know.

The Sonos Community is always here to help.

I just purchased a new  Samsung QLED TV and HW -S60T Sound Bar and have been trying (to no avail) to connect via Bluetooth to my Sonos Play 1 Speakers. Can it be done? Geek Squad guy came out and said “no way Jose”.  So I thought I’d do some checking. Any help out there? Thanks JD

Only the SonosMove speaker has Bluetooth capabilities. All other Sonos speakers only use WiFi. 

Thanks DrFresh….Are there any other ways (other than Bluetooth) to make the Sonos Player 1 Speakers part of my Samsung QLEDTV and Sound bar surround sound experience?

The only way would be to spend more. Buy a Beam and that will connect with your TV via hdmi. Then you can connect your Player 1s as surround speakers to the Beam. 

Thank you for your insight and expertise. I*’m OK with spending a little more. So if I called Best Buy, explained what I wanted they could would know what I*m talking about?  When the tech from Best Buy came out he did not seem to have been as well informed as you are. He offered no alternative such as a beam and HDMI connection. Perhaps I can call and talk to another engineer and manager.  Again, thank you for your help.

Check out Peter Pee on YouTube. He has a bunch of videos on Sonos there.