Windows 11 surround 5.1 to Beam Gen 1 + Era 100 satellites over TV HDMI + ARC!

Hello ​@mta102222, welcome to the Sonos Community!

I’m glad you were able to use your Sonos Home Theater with your Windows PC and get surround 5.1 audio.

I’ve moved this thread to the relevant group Sonos Products As PC Speakers.

Thank you for sharing and I hope this helps others who are struggling to get the same outcome.

Absolutely misleading and posted/moved to wrong group. Frustrating and wasting people's time as this really has nothing to do with ‘Sonos as PC speakers’ at all!

This is just your standard Sonos/soundbar/home theatre/TV setup. You're just using a laptop as a video source to your TV, it's basically the same as if you were using any other video device eg, Chromecast, google tv, apple tv, set top box, DVD player or blueray player or even an amp/av receiver.

I’d say the issues you were having were probably related to Arc/eArc as Beam gen1 doesn't have HDMI 2.1 and therefore no eArc can be more fiddly getting hardware, connections, settings to all line up.

I make these poinnts because anyone that knows the struggle (or the limitations/inability) attempting to use a Sonos soundbar as your your PC speakers… not as your TV speakers 🙄 seriously that's literally what you purchased ‘home theatre’. Finding out the correct settings and hardware for your standard TV - Soundbar setup... Wrong group. 

Also Beam gen1 isn't capable of Dolby Atmos no matter what you do, settings, hardware there's simply no upwards firing drivers for one 🤷 its not going to sound any better attempting to use it for DA.

Without a sub… that's 5.0 too not 5.1 

WOW!  Pretty aggressive (not to mention product knowledgeable) for a first post, ​@Wr3cked.  Which would be fine (I guess) if we knew what you are actually complaining about, or who the “you” is you are directing it to.  

Following up on my own post, I also found another way of doing it. 

I tried to repeat my success with a USB-C to 4K60 HDMI Anker Nano hub, not the previous UGreen USB-C to HDMI 2.2 cable (just to see if my success can be generalized).

I only saw stereo as a supported format, so the method I used in version 1 did not work. As a reminder, in version 1, the UGreen USB-C to HDMI adapter gave lots of supported formats - including Atmos, which allowed me to use Dolby Access to enable Dolby Atmos for Home Theatre for subsequent transcoding by my TV to DD5.1. I could not do that here.

What worked this time:

Use CRU tool to modify the EDID of my Sharp 55'TV to support 5.1 PCM (and DD, listed as AC3 in the CRU tool)

Select 5.1 in Windows speaker configuration, and PCM output format (i.e. 16 bit 44 KHz or similar)

Select Dolby Digital 5.1 (DD 5.1) as an output audio format on my TV, whose ARC (not E-ARC) port is linked to the Beam Gen 1 + Era 100 surrounds

This gave me 5.1 surround from all Windows sources. My Sharp TV is transcoding any input format (i.e. Atmos in version 1, L-PCM in this version 2) into DD 5.1. Not sure if all TVs can do this - I guess I struck it lucky.

What partially worked:

Using APO drivers and FX Product Config to enable Dolby (how to do this is well documented elsewhere - look for it). 

This method provided DD 5.1 to the Beam Gen 1 ONLY when the source already has DD 5.1 encoding (e.g. movies and some games with DD encoder like Resident Evil 5), but only gave DD 2.0 when the source did not. I can see the DD audio logo on my TV whenever I play any audio source on my PC - so the APO driver is defintely transcoding. However, for some reason, I cannot select 5.1 in the speaker config when the output format in Windows is set to Dolby Digital (I get an error stating the format is not supported), so I only get DD 2.0 for non-native 5.1 sources as Windows reports stereo to them.

At this point, I experimented with selecting PCM output and 5.1 speaker config - which finally worked!

Hope this helps someone!