I bought a new setup with Arc ultra, era 300 and sub gen 4. This first thing I did was starting Spotify for testing the system. The bass was underwhelming and sound quality was below average. So I thought about returning all products as this is not what I hoped for. After testing on the LG TV I realized there's a huge difference. My advice: you need to communicate this to your customers. Otherwise people will send your products back.

I am facing the same issue

I really can’t talk for everyone, but I would think most people would use Spotify Connect, for easy controlling the music. Add songs to a playlist on the go or fx starting radio from one song, this isn’t possible with Sonos as of right now. I use that allot.

Finding choosing between easy control or better sound quality quiet frustrating.

Edit. Start radio works on iPad (my bad) but not my Android phone. 

Has anyone tried out the latest firmware and seen if there is any improvement?

I've tested and continues the same in my setup. Lower volume with Spotify Connect

I have been using Spotify Connect to play music through my speakers for YEARS now. I heard about this quality difference on the Sonos subreddit, and decided to test it out. Holy crap! The difference is enormous! Please figure out what is causing this so we can enjoy the same audio quality no matter which way we use to play our Spotify songs.

This is getting so annoying I'm considering ditching Sonos entirely. Sound quality and volume has reduced dramatically, hard to give an exact value but I'd say it has halved.

have noticed the same, particularly from spotify connect compared to playing directly from the sonos app. it’s really annoying and if/when i switch to watch tv, the volume is way too high from having to compensate for spotify connect’s low volume. 

Hey hey folks! Someone on Reddit called this out as well, so I did some digging to investigate what has changed. The short answer is that the volumes is perceived lower due to volume normalization.

Now for the longer answer:

Spotify gives us a volume normalization gain value to apply to each track. Earlier this year, we began applying this gain value whenever users use Spotify Connect. This change was needed because it helps with cases like loud advertisements that play between tracks, which can be very apparent and annoying, especially for free users. They might have experienced a jarringly loud ad when all they wanted was to listen to some chill, relaxing music.

Most of the gain values provided by Spotify are negative, which means they lower the volume. That’s why many users perceive this decrease in volume as a drop in quality, which isn’t the case.

thanks Mike, obviously this is a big issue for a lot of folks and is sort of an odd choice for Sonos to make that decision based on ad volume for free Spotify users. 
 

is this something that will be looked into further to mitigate/eliminate volume differences between the two sources? Its kind of a crappy bandaid placed over an issue on Spotify’s side, paid users shouldn’t be punished for this 

So this is a generic measure? You cannot turn this off on the Spotify site?

It would appear yes, if you use the Native Apps with speakers directly attached:

https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/volume-normalization/

And no, if you use Spotify Connect to play:

Note: You can’t change audio settings when using Spotify Connect to play on another device.

Yeah seems like normalization is applied when using spotify connect. 

I might try playing from spotify app and picking up and using a line in to a speaker to bypass this feature.

So you can still use spotify but turn off normalization.

Or bluetooth?

Great Idea, seems to have removed normalization.

This work around seems to work. 

I appreciate the detailed explanation. I am curious to know if there are plans to address this rather inconvenient behavior.

Specifically, I've observed that when using Spotify Connect, the volume level seems to require approximately double the setting compared to the Sonos app or other similar services.

Good to see a reason behind this and it shows it's not all in my head. I can confirm that playing Spotify directly from the Sonos app does improve it. I am sure however that the sound quality has also reduced, it doesn't sound anywhere near as full. Surely with a lower input signal it's having to be driven harder.

Annoyingly it seems that requesting a song via Alexa voice commands pulls from the Spotify app and not Sonos. The only reason I went with Sonos was due to the voice commands, I may as well have just bought a Naim Qb.

If Sonos provided meaningful release notes for system updates it wouldn’t have taken 3mths for an explanation to be forthcoming.

Hi all , I've got Apple music and Spotify, I played the same song on both apps through the SONOS APP ( not through air play or Spotify connect ) and Apple music was louder than Spotify.

It would be great to have a setting in the Sonos app to change this behaviour. E.g let me choose to use or ignore the gain value. Spotify is my primary music service and I generally play via the Spotify app and use Spotify Connect.

As a side note, the lower volume seems way more noticeable at times as if the normalisation gain is different on the same tracks on different days. E.g a bit random!

Yes, in the last few days I have also noticed that. The normalization is higher or lower depending of the day. Very, very strange...