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I have a Sonos Beam Gen.2 hooked to an LG TV and I use an nVidia TV Shield Pro for streaming. Everything works perfectly when I’m watching regular TV or playing on the Playstation 5. I can see in the Sonos mobile app various TV channels operating in Dolby Digital 2.0 or Dolby Digital 5.1. On the PS5 the sound is DTS Surround 5.1. Both TV and Playstation sound work flawlessly.

 

The problem starts when I watch Netflix, Prime Video or Plex from the nVidia TV Shield. Occasionally, about once or twice per hour, the sound just stops working out of the blue while the video keeps running.

The temporary fix I found is to cycle the sound output of the TV back to internal TV speakers, then after 1 sec of sound on speakers, the TV switches automatically back to Audio Out (Optical/HDMI ARC) and, magically, the Beam sound works again. Until it happens again 20 min later. I also detect sometimes a bit of skipping or small cracking or popping, but it’s very mild. Usually these smaller things happen more often on Prime Video than on Netflix. When the sound usually stops working it was either in ATMOS or DTS Surround format.

 

After playing with many settings on all devices, what I discovered is that if I force the TV to output the sound only in PCM and not on Auto, then this problem never appears. But obviously that means I lose any surround sound and just use everything on stereo which is kinda sad.

 

I have tried without success to change all HDMI cables as well.

Do you have any other ideas?


Here is a roundup of the most important settings of all devices.

 

Sonos Beam Gen. 2
Software ver. 14.20.1
Connected to LG TV on HDMI 2 - ARC port
Original Sonos HDMI Cable

 

LG TV 55UJ620V-ZA
Software ver. 06.10.45
SIMPLINK (HDMI-CEC) is On
Sound out: Audio Out (Optical/HDMI ARC)
DTV Audio Setting: Auto

 

nVidia TVShield Pro 2019

Model P2897
Software version 9.1.1, Android 11
Connected to LG TV on HDMI 1 (non ARC) using an expensive 8k compatible HDMI cable
HDMI-CEC is On
Match content audio resolution is Off
(preserve audio bit depth and sampling rate over HDMI)
Dolby audio processing is On
Audio format: Auto
Stereo upmix is Off
(upmix stereo stream to 5.1 PCM)

All devices are connected via LAN cable to the Internet and are up to date software wise.

Is there a Digital Sound Out setting on the TV? What other options are available under DTV Audio Settings?

@GuitarSuperstar 

Yes, the Digital Sound is a child option of Audio Out (Optical/HDMI ARC).
It has only two settings, Auto and PCM.
It’s here that if I set PCM, everything gets stereo and the problem disappears. But then I lose any sort of surround.

 

There is also this DTV Audio Setting also set on Auto. You can see in the white popup on the right all possible values.


Since the problem doesn’t manifest on the PS5 (even though it’s surround), I suspect the culprit is somewhere in the nVidia TV Shield settings. 
 

I have this toggle Match content audio resolution. It was off before but I just turned it on.


Then, I had Dolby audio processing turned on, so I turned it off now.

 

There’s also this available formats, set on Auto. These are the possible options:
 

I suspect by having dolby audio processing on and the match content audio resolution off, nVidia Shield might have acted as a middle-man and did some extra processing. But this is just a guess.
I’ll try watching a full movie tonight to see if the problem reappears after these settings.
Unfortunately there’s no way to test it but to watch for a longer time something, which is not ideal :/

 

Set DTV Audio Setting to Dolby Digital Plus and see if that makes a difference.

Solution

So, after watching a few movies on various apps, I can definitely tell the problem went away for good after switching off the Dolby Audio Processing in the advanced sound settings on nVidia TV Shield. I also switched on Match content audio resolution. Basically the solution is shown in the photos above.

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