LG OLED regularly switches from Beam (ARC) back to internal speaker

  • 8 April 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 3943 views

Userlevel 1

I’ve had my Beam for several years, it was previously connected via ARC to a Panasonic Plasma and worked flawlessly (albeit in Stereo). It was primarily used with an Apple TV HD.

Now I’ve got a new LG CX OLED TV and Apple TV 4K, and I’m finding that often, When I turn the TV on, the audio will come out through the internal TV speakers. When this happens, I can sometimes go through the “Setup TV” process in the Sonos app and the TV discovers the sound bar again, but this also doesn’t work some times.

I’ve also tried setting the sound output to Dolby Digital 5.1 in both the TV and Apple TV, but this doesn’t make any difference from what I can tell.

it’s pretty frustrating, so would appreciate any advice.


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1 reply

Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @mongie 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

That does sound pretty frustrating. There are a few possible things that could be going wrong here. We’ll address them in ascending order of difficulty to do something about:

  1. You may have outdated software on your TV. This is somewhat unlikely, but physically easy to check - you’ll find Software Updates in your TV menu.
  2. It could be a temporary software glitch on the TV. Please unplug your TV from power (or switch off, if you have switches) for 30 seconds and plug it back in. 
  3. It could be a bad connection on the HDMI cable, or a bad cable. Please check the cable and if it seems properly connected, swap each end of the cable round so the TV end is now plugged in to the Beam and vice versa. If you have a spare HDMI cable (HDMI 1.4 or better), please try swapping it out, if swapping ends didn’t help.
  4. It could be a CEC conflict on your HDMI “network”. Please unplug any other HDMI devices from your TV and test. If that improves things, add one device at a time and test until you find out which one is causing problems. Disable CEC on that device, if possible. The Apple TV box is unlikely to be the culprit, so I would leave that connected unless all else fails.

Hopefully, the TV reboot will be enough - in 90% of cases, it is.