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Sonos Beam - fluently switching between Spotify and TV

  • 11 May 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 1876 views
D

Hello community! 

 

We today received our Sonos Beam to improve TV’s sound, but also to function as a nice voice controlled Spotify speaker in the kids room.

To achieve this I connected the Sonos Beam to the TV with the HDMI cable to the HDMC ARC port of the TV. TV is Philips (Philips 32PFK5300/12) and the TV has in the Audio/Sound settings the TV speakers as ”Easylink” and HDMI ARC is on.

But switching back to TV seems to have it’s issues. I have read other topics about this but I don’t seem to find answer.

  1. I have audio on the TV, e.g. playing Netflix on the chromecast — audio works on Sonos Beam — ok 
  2. I start playing from mobile phone’s Spotify and set the speaker to Sonos Beam — TV audio stops and Beam starts to play Spotify — ok
  3. Then — I’d like to stop Spotify and return to the TV audio.
    1. Following the tips and tricks here, the first thing I tried is ”Alexa, switch to TV”. She replies shortly ”okay”, but Spotify continues to play music on the Beam.
    2. Second what I tried is to stop the spotify (I selected iphone as the ”speaker”), Beam stops playing Spofity as it should, but still no TV to be heard.
    3. Third I tried turning up the volume on the TV and only then the TV audio returned to the Beam. For some reason the TV audio goes to zero whenever I play Spotify.

I seem to be able to reproduce this all the time, and I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, or is there some mistake in my setup. I believe it should work a lot smoother. 

Why Beam does not stop the Spotify when I ask Alexa to ”switch to TV”?

What turns the TV volume all the way to zero in the above?

Any tips appreciated!

EDIT; the TV also has the optical audio output, but not sure if using the toslink-hdmi adapter would improve anything here...?

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Best answer by GuitarSuperstar 11 May 2021, 15:47

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3 replies

G
Userlevel 7

In the Sonos app:

1. Disable Hardware Volume Control under App Preferences.

2. Disable and re-enable TV Autoplay under the Beam’s settings.

3. Reset the Volume Limit under the Beam’s settings.

Also, try saying “Alexa, set mode to TV”.

"Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." - Rashi
D

Thanks for the troubleshooting tips, looks like something changed. Still not 100 % logical (see rest of this post) but at least now if Spotify is playing and I say ”Alexa switch to TV”, that seems to work: Spotify stops and TV sound resumes. Could it be that the TV Autoplay was somehow stuck and toggling it off and on fixed it?

I can’t see what the connection from Hardware volume control would be to this — isn’t that the iPad/iPhones volume control — whether it should control Sonos volume or not.

Also reseting the volume limit might have changed something, but I fail to see how that might be connected.

However saying ”Alexa set mode to TV” was bit confusing, it asked to confirm ”sorry on which device”, to which I continued ”Kids” (the room name). Then i also tried to say ”Alexa set mode to TV on kids”. Then I noticed that the audio has actually went back to the crappy built-in speakers of the TV, I had to toggle the Easylink in TV settings on/off to get the audio back to the audio system.

So is the latter command trying to control the HDMI device (in this case the TV it self) and that changes the mode to TV speakers…??

G
Userlevel 7

The command is supposed to switch your Beam from music mode to TV mode, but if it doesn’t work, stick with “Alexa, switch to TV”.

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3514?language=en_US

For TV Autoplay to function properly, the Beam needs to receive an audio signal from the TV. For some reason, your TV’s volume was being set to 0 which prevented TV Autoplay from functioning like it should. I think toggling TV Autoplay off/on and resetting the Volume Limit somehow cleared up how the Beam was communicating with your TV. But I can’t explain exactly why it fixed it.

"Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." - Rashi
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