Retired Sonos Staff

Now Playing Trueplay - Your Impressions

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
November 10, 2015
94 replies
11820 views

Trueplay is now available for the world to try and we’d love to hear what you think about the tuning. Have you noticed a change in your home? What are your impressions?

Personally, I first set up Trueplay in the worst possible situation I had at home, an original PLAY:5 sitting half behind a hollowed out speaker tower speaker which was used as a table for a record player (it’s a long story). The room has stone floors, high ceilings, and a few couches. The difference was immense.

After my dance around the room the PLAY:5 sounded like a completely different speaker. The highs were much clearer, and the lows resonated better throughout the room. Friends in the house couldn’t believe the difference either.

The next room I tested was much better off. The PLAY:3 in there was in a better place already, sitting toward the corner of the room, on top of a table. Wood floors, much smaller room, lower ceilings. There was still a noticeable change, as Trueplay really does help out the PLAY:3, but it wasn’t as big as with that first room.

Let us know how it goes! We recommend testing out 5 tracks that you know very well and seeing the difference. What rooms did you try it out in? What did you notice? What are your experiences? Share your stories here.

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K

Kumar

The effect of the toggle is perhaps a second or two later, but while in the menu. In well placed speakers, there is often no audible effect of Trueplay.

AlanK

Lyricist III

thanks Chris & Kumar, i wasnt expecting a massive difference with the 5 as i had read it seemed to be the 1s that change more, thought this might have been the case for me as one of them is in a long narrow kitchen & the other on a tv cabinet shelf in a living room with a wooden floor.

B

businesstime

Lyricist II

I'm not sure about that as a reason for not providing an Android tool.

Sonos control their speaker production and would have on hand the performance curves of anything played from their speaker models.

This means they could play a set of reference tones that any mobile device could record and compare it to what they know their speaker is generating.

They can then easily fit the variance between what the phone records and the known output of the sonos speaker to a curve that can be used to adjust anything recorded by the android device. This is second/third year engineering or stats kind of stuff ...

This kind of stuff is not ridiculously hard to do in a generalised way, a bit of cynicism here but I would suggest it is more that there is not huge commercial need for them to provide this app to Android users as they are already leaders in the market and the consumer segment that Apple users sit within is probably closer aligned to the kind of people who buy high grade boutique audio equipment.

NB: This could depend on the data format that reaches the SW stack from the android microphone interface, if it is lossy then this approach may not work.

Any truplay hope on the horizon for those of us who don't drink the apple juice?

The issue is, Apple has a limited number of devices, so it’s very easy to calobrate for the microphones (though, even between “identical microphones, there will be variation). Android, on the othe rhand, has hundreds of devices, with very different hardware, often just for a single manufcaturer. Multiply that by hundreds of manufacturers... It’s impossible to calibrate for all devices.

The ideal solution, would be a USB/line level condensor mic, sold as a “Sonos Trueplay calibraiton mic”, that can then be sold for any Android device (probably could have one for Apple, too), for, say, $50, or $100... It would go a long way to making all customers happy on the Trueplay front.

Personally, I have a “Mini DSP” USB callibraiton mic, have downloaded the mic specific calibration files from the company that sells them, and it compares very well to my *much* more expensive condesnor mic that I used to use (near identical, in fact). It was about $80, and connects via USB. I’m sure Sonos could find a device like that, rebrand/adjust firmware to suit, job done. Add a nic emarkup, because, a business needs to make money, and everyone is happy.

Z...

Chris

Lead Maestro

Sonos has said time and time again that androids are produced with too many varied parts within models to support properly. They tested. They reviewed. Wouldn’t work. I’m not sure why a hypothetical debate on that fact.

Respect the Queue (2)Move (3)Beam (1) Era100 (2)ARC (1)SonosOne (1)Playbar (4)Play5 (4)Play1 (3)Play3 (1)Port (2)Connect (1) Roam (2) Ace (1)Connect:Amp (4)Sonos Amp (1)Sub + (9) Echo + Smartthings; (2)Play)

jgatie

Sonos has said time and time again that androids are produced with too many varied parts within models to support properly. They tested. They reviewed. Wouldn’t work. I’m not sure why a hypothetical debate on that fact.

Because the real reason is they hate Android and are wthholding features they could easily implement because they are giving a big nanny nanny boo boo to non-Apple people!

B

businesstime

Lyricist II

Except that those reasons don't make any sense from a software development perspective. Each individual apple model would have known microphone characteristics, with a known reference source (a sonos speaker) you could definitely figure out the equivalent for any android device.

If you google microphone calibration poeple manually do this all the time, there are plenty of papers written on it..

I just wanted to provide a slightly more technical perspective on how they could calibrate microphones across devices as someone who works as a software developer.

Thanks for the informed and constructive feedback though.

K

Kumar

I have recently moved some of my play 1 units and Sub around and retuned them. I found differences in tuning in the play 1 units that are a lot more perceptible now than before, if I toggle Trueplay ON/OFF on the tuned units. No change in how the Sub is dealt with. Unfortunately the comparison baseline is not solid, but I suspect that the tuning algorithms have been changed over the years.

For what this feedback is worth, the change after tuning now is more to my liking while it was imperceptible in the tuning done two years ago.

jgatie

Except that those reasons don't make any sense from a software development perspective. Each individual apple model would have known microphone characteristics, with a known reference source (a sonos speaker) you could definitely figure out the equivalent for any android device.

If you google microphone calibration poeple manually do this all the time, there are plenty of papers written on it..

I just wanted to provide a slightly more technical perspective on how they could calibrate microphones across devices as someone who works as a software developer.

Thanks for the informed and constructive feedback though.

So tell us, why do you think they are withholding this feature from Android users? Do you have any answer that doesn't involve a conspiracy?

Chris

Lead Maestro

Android actually has more features where applicable like ability to connect to sonosnet direct. To imply Sonos doesn’t care to support android fully is without any merit.

Respect the Queue (2)Move (3)Beam (1) Era100 (2)ARC (1)SonosOne (1)Playbar (4)Play5 (4)Play1 (3)Play3 (1)Port (2)Connect (1) Roam (2) Ace (1)Connect:Amp (4)Sonos Amp (1)Sub + (9) Echo + Smartthings; (2)Play)

B

businesstime

Lyricist II

Except that those reasons don't make any sense from a software development perspective. Each individual apple model would have known microphone characteristics, with a known reference source (a sonos speaker) you could definitely figure out the equivalent for any android device.

If you google microphone calibration poeple manually do this all the time, there are plenty of papers written on it..

I just wanted to provide a slightly more technical perspective on how they could calibrate microphones across devices as someone who works as a software developer.

Thanks for the informed and constructive feedback though.

So tell us, why do you think they are withholding this feature from Android users? Do you have any answer that doesn't involve a conspiracy?

Dude that is not a conspiracy.

Tho yes I did posit that there may not be a huge commercial incentive to build this feature as it is technically more difficult to implement that in the Apple ecosystem. I'm just saying it is technically possible. Please don't get upset, you are not Sonos.

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