Guide

How to connect a Mac to a Sonos Ray over optical

The Ray takes an optical cable, which makes it one of the easiest Sonos speakers to put on a desk beside a Mac. The awkward part is at the Mac end: most current Macs have no optical output, and once you have added one the volume keys stop working. Both are solvable. Here is the whole job, in order.

What you need

• A Sonos Ray, set up in the Sonos app and on the same network as your Mac.
• An optical cable — TOSLINK, the one with the square ends, also sold as S/PDIF optical. Any length that reaches is fine.
• An optical output on the Mac. This is the part people do not expect. See below.

The Ray’s wired input is optical, so there is no HDMI route into it. An HDMI-only soundbar needs Sonos’s Optical Audio Adapter between the cable and the speaker — a Beam ships with one, and for other models it is a separate purchase.

Most Macs have no optical port

Apple dropped the combined headphone and optical jack years ago. Unless you are on an older Mac there is no digital output on the machine itself, and no software setting will produce one. It has to be added, and it comes in two shapes.

Either way, the thing to find on the spec sheet is an optical S/PDIF or TOSLINK output — not “digital audio” in the abstract, not HDMI audio, not a headphone socket. The hardware page lists what we have checked ourselves.

Connect the cable

Optical cables often arrive with small plastic caps on the ends. Take them off. The connector goes in one way round and clicks when seated — a cable that is half in looks connected and passes no signal, which is the most common reason for silence at this stage.

Run it from the optical output on your dock or interface to the optical input on the back of the Ray. With a live signal you can usually see a faint red light in the socket, which is a quick check that the Mac end is doing something.

Choose the output in macOS

Open System Settings → Sound and pick your dock or interface under Output. It is named after the hardware rather than the speaker — macOS has no idea a Sonos is on the far end.

Two things will look wrong, and both are correct:

• The volume slider is greyed out. A digital output carries no level. The signal leaves at full scale and the speaker decides how loud that is.
• The volume keys do nothing. Same cause. There is nothing on the Mac’s side to turn down, and the cable cannot pass the request on.

Do not go looking for a setting to fix either. Neither is a fault — this is what an optical output is — and there is a section below about it.

Confirm the sound is actually arriving

Play something continuous, then check from the speaker’s side rather than the Mac’s — the Mac cannot see down the cable:

• You can hear it. Obvious, but do it first: the Ray may be at a very low level from a previous setup.
• The Sonos app shows the room playing its TV input. That is how a Sonos reports a wired source, and the only positive confirmation that the signal has arrived.
• The Sonos app changes what you hear and the Mac does not. That combination means the cable is working as intended.

If there is no sound at all: check the output is still selected in Sound settings, check both ends are seated, and check no cap is still on. If your dock has more than one audio output, make sure macOS is pointed at the optical one rather than the headphone socket.

Because the Mac sends at full scale, everything now depends on the Ray’s own volume — set it somewhere comfortable in the Sonos app. If the Ray is grouped with other rooms, ungroup it for now.

Getting the volume keys back

This is where most setups stall. The audio is perfect and the keyboard is useless, so you reach for your phone every time something is slightly too loud — and after a fortnight you go back to wireless and lose the thing you ran the cable for.

Optically is a menu bar app for this. It catches volume up, volume down and mute before macOS handles them, and asks the Ray to change its own level over your local network. The cable carries on carrying the sound. Setup is three things:

• Accessibility permission, because the volume keys are system-defined events that macOS hands to nobody, and catching one first needs an event tap. Three keys, nothing else read.
• Local Network permission, because speakers are found by asking the local network who is out there. It talks to the Ray directly — no Sonos account and no cloud service in the path.
• One choice: which output the keys apply to. Pick your dock or interface, and the keys go back to normal macOS behaviour the moment you switch to headphones.

On first run it usually finds the speaker for you, by looking for a zone that both has a real optical socket and is playing a wired input. It keeps checking afterwards: if your chosen speaker is not reporting a wired input, the menu bar says so rather than looking healthy while the keys drive the wrong room.

It needs macOS 14.4 or later, runs free for 14 days with no card and no account, and then costs US$10 for one Mac.

If something is still not right

Anything else — including “will this dock work” before you buy one — ask. Troubleshooting for the app itself is on the support page.