Spoob
Member
The subject line is correct - I'm writing on behalf of two very baffled people,, myself (Sonos Beam owner) and my brother who has a Sonos Arc.
Both of us have recently got ourselves set up with a surround environment - in my case it's the Beam (would have an Arc but it's a smaller room), two Play 1s as surrounds and a sub mini. Brother has same thing but Arc instead of Beam. Both connected to TVs using HDMI cables to ARC port (eARC in his case).
I'll cut to the chase and leave out a lot of my failed experiments to say YES we have both managed to hear 5.1 from our setups. Mostly via Apple Music, but we had one tiny tiny bit of success with two ELP albums, more about that in a moment. So it works.
Started off my exploration into 5.1 by retrieving a bunch of box sets I bought in the not-too-distant past, Jethro Tull and Mike Oldfield and so on boasting a DVD containing 5.1 mixes. Great! Let's hear what they can do.
First problem - didn't want to be constantly popping DVDs in and out, but I do have a NAS system (as does my brother) so maybe the solution's to rip the audio from them and store them as FLAC files. Did so using two great pieces of software, MakeMKV and Music Media Helper.
I was too eager to love it though and didn't realize until the Sonos app told me that I wasn't really getting 5.1 but "really good stereo" - Stereo PCM. It was great sound but I guess anything's going to sound good when you have rear speakers and a sub mini....
How did I encode the files? In all the ways Sonos's page said it should handle. Did both WAV and FLAC which caused a bit of confusion at first because Plex on my TV doesn't read those and Kodi read only the WAV files. Did some playing around and went straight into the smart TV and it saw them and played them (just not in surround). Loaded the files up into a wav editor and yep, there they are, 6 separate wave files.
I should state here that all these other potentially complicating factors - Amazon Fire Stick, Kodi, Plex, TV...we've already eliminated them because we know it works via Apple Music and the two ELP albums I mentioned.
So, about the ELP ones. What was different about them that allowed them to play? Well, apparently they are just 1 channel. Yet Sonos recognizes them as Hi Res and plays them and they do sound great. I was baffled how they could be one channel when I encoded them the same as the other discs, then I realized what it was. Music Media Helper ripped the entire album to one big file (no idea why) and so I had to load the files into Audacity and split them up manually, and I guess when I saved the individual files there must have been a setting that shrunk them down to 1 channel. No idea how I did that and I haven't been able to replicate it. Also no clue why it sounds so good when theoretically it's a mono file.
So anyway we are at our wit's end. Today we spotted a post on Reddit where a guy says he wrote a Linux script that converts 5.1 FLAC files into DTS MP4s, so I've reached out to him.
Anyone else got some ideas? How can we encode files so Sonos will play them?
Both of us have recently got ourselves set up with a surround environment - in my case it's the Beam (would have an Arc but it's a smaller room), two Play 1s as surrounds and a sub mini. Brother has same thing but Arc instead of Beam. Both connected to TVs using HDMI cables to ARC port (eARC in his case).
I'll cut to the chase and leave out a lot of my failed experiments to say YES we have both managed to hear 5.1 from our setups. Mostly via Apple Music, but we had one tiny tiny bit of success with two ELP albums, more about that in a moment. So it works.
Started off my exploration into 5.1 by retrieving a bunch of box sets I bought in the not-too-distant past, Jethro Tull and Mike Oldfield and so on boasting a DVD containing 5.1 mixes. Great! Let's hear what they can do.
First problem - didn't want to be constantly popping DVDs in and out, but I do have a NAS system (as does my brother) so maybe the solution's to rip the audio from them and store them as FLAC files. Did so using two great pieces of software, MakeMKV and Music Media Helper.
I was too eager to love it though and didn't realize until the Sonos app told me that I wasn't really getting 5.1 but "really good stereo" - Stereo PCM. It was great sound but I guess anything's going to sound good when you have rear speakers and a sub mini....
How did I encode the files? In all the ways Sonos's page said it should handle. Did both WAV and FLAC which caused a bit of confusion at first because Plex on my TV doesn't read those and Kodi read only the WAV files. Did some playing around and went straight into the smart TV and it saw them and played them (just not in surround). Loaded the files up into a wav editor and yep, there they are, 6 separate wave files.
I should state here that all these other potentially complicating factors - Amazon Fire Stick, Kodi, Plex, TV...we've already eliminated them because we know it works via Apple Music and the two ELP albums I mentioned.
So, about the ELP ones. What was different about them that allowed them to play? Well, apparently they are just 1 channel. Yet Sonos recognizes them as Hi Res and plays them and they do sound great. I was baffled how they could be one channel when I encoded them the same as the other discs, then I realized what it was. Music Media Helper ripped the entire album to one big file (no idea why) and so I had to load the files into Audacity and split them up manually, and I guess when I saved the individual files there must have been a setting that shrunk them down to 1 channel. No idea how I did that and I haven't been able to replicate it. Also no clue why it sounds so good when theoretically it's a mono file.
So anyway we are at our wit's end. Today we spotted a post on Reddit where a guy says he wrote a Linux script that converts 5.1 FLAC files into DTS MP4s, so I've reached out to him.
Anyone else got some ideas? How can we encode files so Sonos will play them?
