I would have to agree with Chris, here I would like to also know weather or not you all are having this problem with or with out your sonos products connected to a tv, also; if you could tell us what if anything you might have done to the settings that might shine a light on to what is happening, with the arc you deffinitly need to have an HDMI 2.1 cable, also the HDMI arc port needs to be an E arc port.
Ron
OK, so a few things here.
First of all, let me begin by saying I’m not Sonos staff… Let me get that extremely clear right from the bat get go, so please don’t put the blaim of this problem directly on me.
I simply would like everyone however though extremely unacceptable and terrible as this is, to just calm down for a minute, and hear me out on this. Just humor me here. I’m not gonna say you all are wrong, Sonos is right, I promise, so please just listen to what I’ve gotta say.
I read literally through all the responses on this thread, as I’m having just the oppisit issue. My problem with both a Beam, and also with a Roam is that Alexa’s volume is way way way too loud in perportion to the other audio volume such as Apple music etc.
First off, am I understanding all of you correctly that this is only happening when connected to a TV audio source either via HDMI arc or via optycal?
Here are some things which would be helpful rather than just saying damn it Sonos, fix it! First, what version of HDMI are you using? Like, version 2? version 3? etc. Also, are you using a cable that supports that version of HDMI? I know you’d not think the cable would matter. Neither did I at first, so fair assumption, but actually, yeah, it does, believe it or not.
Also, is this happening for anyone of you with things aside from TV audio output regardless the method of connectivity?
Also, I assume you all have power cycled the speakers. I know, that’s not going to probably solve it, as clearly, this is not isolated to just a few people. I get it, but seriously, you’d be amazed at how many times just something that simple will fix things. Sounds crazy, I know, but trust me, you’d be surprised… really you would!
Now as for the two voice assistants, keep in mind, if I can be so blunt to say this, with all due respect to all of you, actually, no. It’s not as easy to fix as you all make it sound. Here’s the thing, and I think one of you said you were a coder, so you should know this if that truly authenbticly is the case…
Amazon through their S3 AAS cloud services offers all these companies who integrate Alexa into their devices what is known as an SDK. In other words, a “software developer’s kit.” Essentially, within that kit, you have various different API’s. For the less tech savvy, all an API is is a go between, if you will, that allows a product to call back to and communicate/talk to the Amazon servers to send and receive things from Alexa. So, let’s say you was to say, What is the weather for Chicago IL? Using the API specific to weather queries, Sonos, in this case, goes out through means of that API, contacts Amazon’s servers, says, hey, Joe Blow wants to get the weather for X location. Where X is whatever, fill in the blank as you see fit.
So, there are other API’s as well, like for instance volume. So, when you say, set the volume to 4, we’ll just say, an API call request is made, the Server is contacted, then an API string, or key, rather, is then incrypted and sent back to be decoded/descrambled by Sonos. Sonos then says, ok, command received, command initiated. Then an API response is made. This could be in the form of Alexa verbally responding, or maybe just her/him reacting to your command. I say him, as you may have it set to Ziggy instead of Alexa. The point is, a response in one form or another is made.
Now, take Amazon, and let’s take Sonos completely out of the picture entirely. They also have their own API’s that they internally use, which aren’t released to the public. They’re most likely if I had to guess things that allow the A.I part of the assistant to work.
So here’s the problem with this whole volume issue that Sonos probably is up against. It’s a bit difficult to totally trouble shoot this, as we don’t really totally know where the problem is breaking exactly. I mean we know the end result, true. But what we don’t know is is it breaking before it hits the Amazon server, is it happening between receiving the command, then sending back the response to Amazon, or to Sonos, is it coding in the action itself response result that’s botched up, or is it indeed within the Sonos firmware.
I truly agree with all of you all. It’s probably in the Sonos firmware, but, let’s be really fair. Even for Sonos engineers, this would be like tracking down a needle in a haystack. I didn’t by any means say it’s impossible… let me be very clear… and further, almost a year out still having no sollution is, I agree, totally unacceptable in most cases.
Realize though the tree you’re barking up against. If we could pinpoint down exactly where down the chain of things the problem starts to break, then you’re right… it would be super super easy then to fix.
The issue isn’t that it’s not easy to fix. The issue is more finding exactly where things start to break, and then once we know that, then figuring out exactly why. I mean, it coudl be a number of things. It might even be something as easy as a setting which you’d never in your rightest mind think would effect this nor be even remotely rellavent, but it wind up being the nail dead on the head that fixes it.
It’s really just tricky to say.
I hope this is taken the way it’s meant. Again, I’m no staff member, though I’d love to be, LOL! But I just want you all to maybe look at this a bit from another angle. K?
Chris.
