Question

Adjust balance when playing music?

  • 16 November 2019
  • 8 replies
  • 522 views
N
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I have a Beam, Sub and 2 Play One SLs setup as a 5.1 Home Theatre.

I also have Two Play:1s in another room setup a stereo pair. With these if I go into the EQ settings I can adjust the balance.

However on the 5.1 setup I have two poor choices for playing music:

  1. Leave it in ambient mode which is far two quiet for the Play Ones, but at least it adjusts the balance according to the distance settings for the Surround.
  2. Go to full mode which allow the Play Ones to play the music as they should, but resets the balance to be equal, making it far too loud in the closest speaker and therefore ruining stereo sound.

Why isn’t a balance slider available for the Play Ones, just as with my paired Play:1s in the other room?

What other choices do I have for balancing out the sound? Would Trueplay solve this? Do I have to consider breaking the Ones and Sub out of 5.1? Could they be grouped with the Beam differently?

If there is no good way to solve this I would like it to be considered as a feature request - and I may have to return my Sonos as it seems ridiculous to spend well over £1000 on a sound system and to not be able to adjust the balance!

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8 replies

N
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I wold love to hear back from Sonos on this, @Ryan S ?

 

Why does playing music in full (rather than ambient) mode ignore the balance setting?

Surely this is a bug?

106rallye
Userlevel 7
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As the Play:1’s are invisible when part of a 5.1 set up, changing balance would also mean a change in balance on the Beam. Normally the balance seems to be controlled by Trueplay (or I suppose if you do not use Trueplay in a standard -balanced - setting).

So the balance setting is not ignored, but governed by your 5.1 set up. You are right there does not seem to be a way to change this.

Ken_Griffiths

EQ Settings currently apply to the entire room, so the only way to achieve a manual EQ adjustment on the One SL’s is to set them up as a separate ‘stereo paired’ Room and 'group’ them with the Beam instead, which I guess is a PITA.

I’m fairly sure this issue has been suggested to Sonos in the past to maybe add this feature to HT surrounds, but it’s not something I have personally seen a lot of people call for, so it’s perhaps one of those enhancements that maybe sat on their 'pending’ list, perhaps?

N
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So the balance setting is not ignored, but governed by your 5.1 set up. You are right there does not seem to be a way to change this.

I can set the 5.1 “balance” by stating how far the rear speakers are form me. 

My issue is that when I play music in “full” mode rather than “ambient” the balance is ignored.

 

N
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EQ Settings currently apply to the entire room, so the only way to achieve a manual EQ adjustment on the One SL’s is to set them up as a separate ‘stereo paired’ Room and 'group’ them with the Beam instead, which I guess is a PITA.

Yes, definitely a PITA! And I’m not sure if the music would remain in sync if just grouped rather than “bonded”, but TBH if that was a problem I wouldn’t bother grouping in the Beam.

This problem wouldn’t be so bad if Sonos had presets/scenes to allow you to easily switch from one config to another.

I had a look at https://speakerscenes.com/ as an alternative but it is limited by the API that Sonos provides which will only allow grouping and ungrouping of rooms, not the assigning/unassigning of devices to rooms.

 

Ryan S
Userlevel 7
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Thanks for tagging me in@NullReference. I’ll make sure to share your feedback with the team.

The 5.1 setup is designed with a sweet spot in mind, usually the center of the room. With music listening, full stereo is designed to mirror the front in the back, which was added by customer request as Ambient was just the default behavior when the Playbar first came out. 

 

If you tend to sit to one side, that side will naturally be louder, but if that’s where you always sit, you could configure your home theater with that in mind. During the first setup of the home theater, when you add surrounds, you are asked to pick how close your surrounds are individually to the main seating place. You could use that to make one side louder than the other. Also, you can use Trueplay to reconfigure that sweet spot by sitting where you usually do and running the tuning from there.

Additional configuration is a little limited at the moment, but I’ll be sure to pass it along.

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N
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If you tend to sit to one side, that side will naturally be louder, but if that’s where you always sit, you could configure your home theater with that in mind. During the first setup of the home theater, when you add surrounds, you are asked to pick how close your surrounds are individually to the main seating place. You could use that to make one side louder than the other.

 

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for getting back to me, but I don’t think I’ve made the issue clear...

I am setting the distance of the back speakers and that works fine for TV: the sound is balanced.

However for Music the sound is only (left/right) balanced if  I have “Music Playback” set to “Ambient”, if I set it to “Full” the balance I have set is not applied.

I find it necessary to set it to “Full” as otherwise the rear speakers are too quiet for Music.

So the issue I have is that the left/right balance is lost when “Music Playback” is set to “Full”.

Surely this isn’t intended?

Ryan S
Userlevel 7
Badge +26

Thanks for clarifying, I’ll look into that one for you. I can’t speak to if it’s intended or a bug, but I’ll send it up for you.

 

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