Alexa Volume Steps Too Large

Hello Sonos friends,

Does anyone else feel that the volume steps via Alexa are too large?

This is a problem for me, especially at the lower volume steps. Level 1 is barely audible, while level 2 is too loud for background listening in my apartment. I don’t ever even get above level 5 or so, even when I want the music “loud”. I’m constantly having to walk over to the Sonos One and tap the volume controls, something I never had to do with the regular Echo.

Clearly the Sonos One just has a huge volume range, while Alexa only has a 1-10 scale. I just wish more of the range was centered on quieter volume steps.

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Hi, Vano. Welcome to the community. This is valuable feedback and I have heard chatter about it elsewhere from customers on different platforms. It is something we are looking into but do not yet have a time-frame for resolution. We will keep you posted. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

I would like a volume around 1.5 in my bedroom. You have finer control within the app though, but it would be nice if there was a bit more control with the voice perhaps.

Thanks Edward! Excited to hear this is on the team’s radar. 🙂

This drives me crazy, even worse if you have multiple speakers and sub. Volume 1 still requires me to find my phone and reduce the volume to set it to a reasonable background level for dinner. Anything after 4 is too loud for Alexa to work without yelling anyway, so it's a bit pointless.

Same here. In the living room, when I just want to play radio as background music, even volume 1 is too much sometimes (2x Play:1, Playbar & Sub as a group) and if I accidentally set the volume to 5+, im likely to be deaf afterwards... :-)

More fine-grained volume control is needed.

Want to add my vote for this. Alexa is a bit too loud for use in my apartment.

You can use an Alexa command to trigger an IFTTT recipe and set the volume anywhere between 0 and 100.

+1. In our apartment, 5 is loud and anything higher is deafening. Whereas 2 is often a bit louder than we want for casual listening and 1 is too silent. It would better if volume control was stepped from 0-100 so we could say "Alexa, volume 15" to set between what is currently between Volume 1 and Volume 2.

Following on from this line of thinking in addition to setting volume by a specific numberin the 0-100 range, it would be great to be able to say:

"Alexa, a bit louder" - increase by 1

"Alexa, louder" - increase by 5

"Alexa, a lot louder" increase by 10 (or 15, or 20 - nice if it was user configurable).

Following on from this line of thinking in addition to setting volume by a specific numberin the 0-100 range, it would be great to be able to say:

"Alexa, a bit louder" - increase by 1

"Alexa, louder" - increase by 5

"Alexa, a lot louder" increase by 10 (or 15, or 20 - nice if it was user configurable).

Excellent idea!

Since Amazon uses the 0-10 step volume range for Alexa, it is most likely up to them, not Sonos, to implement such a change to the voice service. As much as I'd like to see that change, it doesn' seem likely to happen soon, if ever. For now, use Alexa (or Google Assistant) in combination with IFTTT for more granular control. For SmartThings users, various routines and/or smartapps such as webCore can provide very sophisticated automated volume and playback control.

I agree here major issue

I know this is an old thread, but if anyone's still experiencing this issue - try setting the Volume Limit for the room to a lower %. The Alexa 1-10 scale should adjust accordingly, with 10 being the maximum of the limit.

Thank you! It didn’t occur to me that the max volume was a scalar and not a cutoff. This works brilliantly to give me much more range of reasonable volume when using Alexa to control Sonos. I put mine all the way down to 30% and now a volume of 5 is a nice middle ground.

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