Troubleshooting SPDIF connection to Beam for Windows 10

Hi there,

I’m struggling to get my Sonos Beam set up to play audio from my PC and was hoping someone might have seen my issue/have some troubleshooting tips!

I’ve been following this nice guide to get my Beam working with my Windows 10 PC. I bought the suggested DAC and installed the associated drivers. It all seems in order - there’s now a CMedia audio wizard in my System Tray, and when I plug in headphones to the `Front Out` port in the DAC I can hear audio from the PC. So far, so good!

Unfortunately I’m falling at the next hurdle - getting the audio through to be played out by the Beam. Using the CMedia wizard I can toggle the SPDIF out option (it’s obvious when this is on because you can see the red light coming out of the SPDIF out port on the DAC). I then attached the HDMI cable and HDMI-to-SPDIF adapter that came with the Beam. Having done this though, no audio seems to come out of the Beam!

I thought perhaps I’d need to go through the setup procedure in the Sonos App to get the Beam to recognise the input. However, when I do this the app tells me that it can’t find any HDMI-ARC input. I was expecting that the SPDIF adapter should convert into HDMI-ARC - perhaps there’s some “I’m here” signal that it’s not properly sending? Either way the app doesn’t seem to help me make any progress here :(.

So I’m at something of a loss! Ideally I’d try a different speaker and see if it’s a problem with the Beam or some other part of the setup, but I don’t have anything that takes SPDIF for me to test with. Is there some crucial step along the way that I’ve missed?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!