Back in January 2023, I decided to treat myself to a full entertainment system upgrade for my bedroom, replacing my 8 year old TV, PS4, and FireTv Stick with a 2022 LG C2 EVO, PS5, AppleTV 4K, and Sonos Beam gen2 + Mini Sub.
At first I was really happy with the Sonos setup from a sound quality perspective particularly with music, but I struggled with getting surround sound to work. No matter how many times I ran Trueplay front audio sounded further away in front of me and rear audio sounded right in front of me. Left to right surround effects are only really noticeably if my face is within 12 inches of the Beam; I used SpiderMan No Way Home on AppleTV 4K (bought and downloaded not streamed) and some other sources recommended on the internet for testing surround sound.
After reading countless posts on this board and others I update my TV’s setting to Passthrough Audio, eARC enabled, and HDMI settings to Bitstream. No change in surround quality, but I did see it now says Dolby Atmos in the Sonos app. I’m out of my window to return the MiniSub at Best Buy or I would have returned the whole Sonos setup.
Another side effect of using passthrough audio is whenever an Atmos movie is played through my AppleTV 4K there is periodic loud Pops like a speaker blowing and the Beam looses audio for a few seconds before turning back on, its not consistent seems to occur when a lot of action and loud effects like Antman Quantum Mania battle scene at the end of the film. On the PS5 while playing games the sound cuts out (no pop) consistently about every minute for a few seconds which is unbearable because it cuts out dialogue which impacts the gameplay.
So my question is does Sonos Beam gen2 + Mini Sub really support Dolby Atmos and eArc? Is there any solution to the Sonos system not working properly with my TV and PS5? I see a lot of people posting similar issues.
I don’t experience sound cut outs when watching non Dolby Vision / Dolby Atmos content or on the PS5 unless playing a game (ie watching trailers etc through PS store, etc are fine). As far as I know PS5 isn’t Atmos.
I still hope surround sound will one day work, but I suspect it never will. The audio is still far better than the TV speakers alone especially with the mini sub, but I could have bought a lot cheaper system and had the same effective stereo results.