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Hey all,

I've been breaking my head over a weird situation with my audio at home. Trying to connect my Nvidia Shield (2017), through a USB DAC (Douk U2) to my Sonos Beam. I'm using a projector without ARC, so am bound to use the optical connection.

I've been testing playing videos from various services and some that I have stored locally. The only ones that produces sound on the Beam are ones with AC3 5.1. With any other ones (AAC, AAC 5.1), the Beam doesn't return any sound. In the app under "About My System", the Beam shows a blank at "Audio in:".

This seemed rather odd to me, so I ended up buying a digital-to-analogue converter so I can test the optical signal with my headphones. Just bought a cheap one (Techole HS203-BK). In this test I'm still connecting the Shield via USB to the Douk U2, and the Douk U2 via optical to the digital-analogue converter. Funnily enough I get sound when using files with AAC or AAC 5.1 sound, or when I force the Shield to output regular stereo sound. (AC3 5.1 gives me noise even though the digital-analogue converter is supposed to be able to handle it)

Long story short; I'm happy that my Beam plays AC3 5.1, and I'm okay if other format are downsampled to regular stereo. However, I'm not able to produce any stereo sound on the Beam. Any ideas?

Hi @amchelmer 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I thought at first I’d be able to help you as I have a Shield myself, but I have to be honest - the Douk U2 is throwing me. As the Shield is using it as an external sound card, it changes things, I guess.

The Beam supports the following formats: 

  • Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3 by another name)
  • Dolby Digital 2.0
  • Stereo PCM

I know that on the Shield, you can manually select which output formats will be used, though it seems strange to me too that you can’t get stereo to work. I did spot an option on my Shield that allows for stereo sources to be upmixed to AC-3 5.1 - you could try that.

You can also try calling our technical support line - they can tell you what the Beam reports about the inputted feed, but don’t expect them to troubleshoot as this setup is unsupported.

However, it could be that the Douk is operating outside of SPDIF specifications, at least for stereo, which would produce this result.

If the Douk has firmware that can be updated, I recommend you check for updates.

Instead of the Douk, you could try using a normal HDMI splitter that gives you an optical output from the Shield’s HDMI port. Again, this is unsupported.

I hope this helps.

Instead of the Douk, you could try using a normal HDMI splitter that gives you an optical output from the Shield’s HDMI port. Again, this is unsupported.

I hope this helps.

 

I agree with this.  I wasn’t even aware that Shield could output audio via it’s USB ports.  Using an HDMI extractor/splitter seems like it would be a more straight forward solution, and definitely has been recommended and used successfully by people on this forum.

@Corry P  and @melvimbe, thanks for your help, I ended up getting a HDMI audio extractor and it works like a charm!Cheers!

Hi @amchelmer 

Glad to hear you have found a solution, and thanks for updating us!

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