I have a LG OLED and beam and have the Dolby Digital audio processing lag over ARC and Optical output that is mentioned every day over on the Sonos Community Forums. Seriously, it's the top post in Home Theater on the Sonos furms. The Beam suffers from a .4s audio lag behind the video when playing Dolby Digital audio. It's heavily noticeable. The beam simply doesn't work with LG OLEDs and/or certain Sony TV's. This is a HUGE caveat and hopefully people read before buying.
IMO, Sonos rushed this product to market. They make great music speakers but aren’t ready for TV speakers. Incompatibilities with top brand TV’s is pretty unreal in this day and age. Especially for a high end product like this.
The other issue I have is codec support. Sonos has DD support and literally nothing else. It’s really pathetic. Every other sound bar manufacturer has more than 1 codec support. Dts, Vision, atmos, DD+ should all be supported these days. All of them are heavily used in industry.
The current solution according to the Sonos forums is buying additional aftermarket equipment (an hdmi optical splitter $50) and completely bypassing the LG OLED. This fixes the lag issue but then it completely breaks Netflix and Amazon Prime Videos which uses DD+ for their high end videos. Everyone watches Netflix these days but guess what Sonos doesn’t support DD+ and since you’re now bypassing the TV it wont convert the DD+ to DD and u get no sound or u have to go into the settings every single time u play something and change it to stereo. This solution also removes ARC and CEC support one of the biggest selling points of the Beam.
The other solution I see around is forcing to PCM which is stupid cuz you lose Dolby digital altogether and just bought a 400 speaker that now only supports stereo which u can likely get for less than a hundred dollars.
The speaker sound is great but the # of compatibility issues and workarounds needed to get this to work is absolutely insane.
People say it’s not rocket science. But I’m literally a NASA rocket scientist and even I can’t get this to work properly. I really hope people read this comment before purchasing. I wish i had known a lot of these issues beforehand.
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