Hi @Bourbon42 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

The temporary lowering of volume is referred to as “ducking”. I’m not sure if you want the ducking to stop altogether, or to only be temporary (as it should be).

To stop it from happening at all, I suspect that you’ll need to move the Arc to a different “room” in the Google Home app than the Google device - as Google sees them as being in the same room, it is telling your Arc to duck it’s volume so commands can be heard. Moving them to be in separate rooms should prevent this behaviour.

Ducking should be always be temporary and the volume should return when the third-party device stops listening - why this is not happening, I’m not sure. A reboot of both devices may help.

I would not expect removal of SVC or Alexa to help with this - the Arc is not the device where the behaviour is triggered from.

I hope this helps.

Thanks

The Arc isn’t on the Google Home app.  It’s not using Google Home or Assistant

However, I hadn’t considered that my TV is connected to Google Home with its built-in chromecast, so I’ll have to figure out if there’s a way to stop my TV from ducking. Playbar used the optical connection and never had this issue. 

What happens if you disable HDMI -CEC?

Hi @Bourbon42 

I understand that you don’t have Google installed on your Arc, but are you sure your Sonos system isn’t linked to in your Google Home? In the Google Home app, tap the + in the top left, then Set up a device » Works with Google. If you see Sonos listed there under “Linked Services”, then they are linked.

If the Chromecast device was ducking, you would have heard that through the Playbar too (only when Chromecast was the active input, however) - unless the Chromecast was using CEC to duck the volume, which I think is what @John B wanted to test. CEC would not affect Playbar. Don’t disable CEC on the TV - that will result in no audio - only on the Chromecast (the CEC features may not be labelled as such, but they generally  refer to volume, power and automatic TV input selection).

Solved

Turning off the google speaker’s —in this case a Nest wifi access point — ducking made it stop telling the TV to lower the volume.  ARC connection allows the TV to control the ARC volume, but because the optical connection can’t, the Playbar was never affected.  

I’m used to not using the TV remote for anything and just using the sonos app to control the volume; it could be a useful feature to allow the arc to ignore volume signals from the TV.