Hi all,

just wanted to share my experience while setting up Trueplay on an ARC because I find it hard to believe what I found. (All measurements done without phone cases, mics on both iPhones work generally as expected in everyday usage.)

I have an iPhone X (2018) and a 1st generation iPhone SE (2016). When I got my ARC a few weeks back I set it up using my iPhone X. I immediately noticed a massive change in sound. The sound became a lot crisper, clearer but also way to sharp, hissy, with a complete lack of mid range and undefined, spongy bass.

I have to say I’m a hobby audio engineer so I have somewhat trained ears as I listen on linear studio speakers on a regular basis. That’s not to say I expect my Home Theater setup to sound equally flat (otherwise I’d not have gone for Sonos speakers).

However, the ARC after Trueplay tuning sounded just terrible. And I mean much worse then eg. my Sonos One. It was ok for Films when reducing treble by 2-3 steps, but music was almost unbearable. I ran Trueplay multiple time, changing my range of movement through the room but I could not improve it.

When I was almost ready to send back the ARC I decided I’d give it one more shot with my old iPhone SE that I had laying around. And what can I say:

First run with the iPhone SE and I was blown away by how good the ARC sounded after Trueplay! I repeated the Trueplay tuning multiple times with the SE and the results stayed consistently great.

With the iPhone SE Trueplay does exactly what I expect it to do: Clearing up the sound while maintaining the overall balanced characteristic of the speaker. It now makes for an enjoyable speaker to listen to music even from an audio engineers perspective!

I know there have been hints before that newer iPhones might not be performing as great with Trueplay. But honestly, I never thought it would be this significant. For me Trueplay on iPhone X is ruining the sound completely!

My personal opinion: If it’s not possible to retrieve consistent mic calibration profiles for later generation iPhones Sonos should definitely consider offering a separate calibration microphone to connect to the phone for Trueplay tuning. This would have the advantage that all phones will perform equally while the mic is connected - even Android users would benefit from it!