HDMI-CEC get lots of publicity, and it’s 99% bad. Now Sonos is using it for serious control in their two newest products, the Beam and the AMP.

Now if some fly-by-night company had proposed this, we would all have a good laugh and just keep doing whatever we were doing. But Sonos, that rare company that builds things that seem to work all the time, has invested in it heavily.

I haven’t had the courage to try it yet. My first few Beams are IR controlled. Haven’t tried it with the AMP. But I am going to have to try it soon.

So I guess I am just thinking aloud as I type, and wondering if any of you have put it to the test.

beam and sony xbr work perfectly. 0 issues

I too was skeptical and have only installed one Beam, but it's been out in the wild for a few months working with ARC and no issues.

I've also been beta testing the new AMP and have been using it on the living room TV with ARC and it's been 100% reliable.  I've even done some testing with ARC over HDBaseT and that also worked.

I am too going to be wading in those waters with the AMP. Have it spec’d on a job to be used with the Samsung Art TV

It isn't that bad. As professionals however, we only want to use things that give us a very high probability of reliability.
In the past CEC has worked 'most' of the time. But working most of the time really doesn't cut it for the majority of us. But the problems that have occurred have been because of the manufacture's sloppy coding - i.e. Samsung TV's auto switching to a wrong input and stupid things like that.

I have no doubt SONOS has their coding solid. So I wouldn't have a problem with trusting the SONOS side of things. What I don't trust and would have concerns about, is the ignorant developers at the TV companies. They are always the ones these days that seem to cause all the problems.
If you test a TV brand and it does fine with the SONOS, then you should be good with all your installs with that brand. At least until next year's models come out, then you need to test again to make sure they didn't break anything.

I have several Beams in the field working flawlessly since their release.

The only issue we have seen is the weird issues with an AppleTV and a Toshiba TV. The Toshiba is about 5 years old, and when the AppleTV is on, and CEC is on, I get no picture on the cable box HDMI. This was fixed by turning off CEC and using the HDMI to Optical piece.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a Roku does not play well with the Beam. You have to go into the menu to turn of CEC on the Roku then it works fine.

The nice thing about using CEC is that the volume on the TV is relative to the Beam output. We have used CEC, IP and IR control with the Beam, and they all seam to work fine.

I haven't worked with one yet, but Global Caché is offering a device that allows one to listen to and control with CEC. Essentially, it sits on the CEC buss as a parallel device. At the CEDIA RTI booth I saw a more ambitious device that seemed that it could be a broker on the CEC buss. (send, receive, intercept)

I have no complaints about BEAM.

My only complaint is the beam sounds terrible, Honestly, I think the play 1's have better bass.

Ive done a few, was excited to try them but its really not great. No issues with CEC so far except for weird startups with samsung.

I use them in offices, exercise rooms and bedrooms. It is better than TV Speakers, adds Alexa, and adds a Sonos zone. The Beam is going in places that the playbar was too expensive for. I would really like a refresh on the Playbar adding ARC and Alexa.

Sonos is not alone Arris/Comcast is also moving this way with their voice controlled remote. Where that leaves us in not yet known, but Comcast feels that this can be made to work (?).

Thanks for the heads ups about the Roku. There is an existing on on this install. Customer has existing Harmony elite so that would be IP control for AMP's volume.




What happens? Anything have to be done in particular or just like a delay on startup?

RTI just started using Pulse-8 products, and those guys know everything there is to know about CEC.

Most of CEC is fine these days... if you have a TV and a receiver or a TV and a soundbar.
But once you start adding other CEC products into the TV there can be 'strange things'. The cheap set top boxes that seem to pop up in customers homes can cause major issues, as can some firmware updates on 'smart' TV's.

My advice, turn off the 'smart TV's' access to the outside world and use a Chromecast / Roku / Apple TV as the smart device. If you're installing everything fresh out the box you should be set! However, if you're adding a device that relies on CEC into an extensive / mixed bag arrangement, be prepared for experimental behaviour.

I'd be avoiding CEC and placing a smart remote whenever possible. Sure, budget certainly doesn't always allow this... and Beam customers may well be at the lower budget part of the spectrum.

I just mounted a Seura mirror TV on a job that was wired/spec'd before the new amp was announced. Cable box and amp will be in rack, speakers in bathroom w/ Seura TV. I'll now consider ARC. What extender did/would you use? Any tips? Thanks Paul.

I set up a Spectrum remote to control a Samsung TV on Thursday- because the boxes & remotes are new and the installer didn't put the instructions in a convenient place, I called tech support and found that the remote really wants to control the box via RF, although it can use IR- accessing this was very similar to the way I have done it with DirecTV boxes. The TV is controlled via CEC and yesterday, I got a text from the homeowner saying that she was seeing a message on the TV about not being connected to a source. The TV had turned on, but the Spectrum box hadn't. Not sure if I'll be installing a sound bar, at this point.