Answered

TV audio through all speakers when not surround

  • 1 January 2024
  • 4 replies
  • 153 views

I have an Arc configured with a Sub and a pair of Era 300s for surround, and hooked up to our Roku TCL TV. Works great for most use cases and the surrounds work great if what we’re watching is encoded for that, but when I’m watching/streaming something on the TV in stereo they don’t work.

Is there a way to force the Sonos system to play the same audio on all 3 speakers if the TV signal doesn’t have surround (i.e. is in Dolby Multichannel PCM 2.0?)

When we stream Spotify or Sonos Radio through the Arc/Eras, it plays the music on all 3 speakers (which is what we want here). But if I’m streaming something in stereo, those rear surrounds stay off and I’d like to figure out how to have them playing the same audio in this setup.

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Best answer by AjTrek1 1 January 2024, 04:01

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4 replies

Userlevel 7

Hi

Unfortunately, when streaming TV conventional/movie audio via Sonos the surrounds will only play when there is material encoded as such. Such material will not play as loud as when streaming music to surrounds.

@AjTrek1  I thought if it was a stereo signal, Sonos would upmix and still send audio to the surrounds?

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Stereo streaming signal yes, mine do this.

TV signal is supposed to be no, mine don’t.

I was able to fix this in my situation by changing the audio output of the Roku to pass thru instead of auto, and also changing the settings on my Samsung TV sound output to enable eARC and set the output to pass thru as well.

 

Now, the Sonos switches between Stereo PCM and Dolby 5.1 as expected -- and the stereo signal upmixes so that the surrounds seem to play full audio now in TV mode.