Android users have been complaining about not being able to do Trueplay tuning for years yet they still continue to purchase Sonos products. Sonos must be doing something right.

I have no Android devices, but I have never bothered with Trueplay on any of my iOS devices.I consider it a niche feature that I have no interest in trying with on my ten Sonos devices.

I found it made a big difference, particularly on pop music at higher volumes where the uncorrected device was very poor. I only managed to tune it as a friend visited with an iphone - the original itouch that I bought to control the Sonos kit was obsoleted years ago and I’m certainly not buying another one.

Indeed, I thought that the tuning made such a big difference that I finally tuned by AV receiver/system, with a similar degree of improvement. 

ISTM that compensating for different room acoustics is the way forward.

I realize it’s not the same thing exactly, but I think the best way to hear the difference tuning makes is with the Move and it’s auto trueplay.  Let it sit in one location for awhile then move it to a different location in the house.  You can immediately tell that it doesn’t sound as good in the new location until the trueplay fixes things.

One can do this for every other tuned speaker by merely toggling true play on/off, something that can be done even with android phones, once the speaker has been tuned via an i device - and the result is close to immediate. Another reason why the restriction around using only the latter for tuning is less of an issue - if the tuned sound is not preferred, one can always revert to the untuned state via the android device.

Since I take care with speaker placement to start with, the differences are not more than very subtle for my play 1 units. But where my bonded Sub is concerned, true play does the job of eliminating bass bloat to a great extent.

I suspect it may do a lot more for the HT products which have to be placed under the TV, which may not acoustically be the best location for them.

Interesting enough, although I have an android that didn’t have the trueplay option, once I ran the trueplay on an Iphone my son had, it appeared as an option on my android. At least I can switch it on and off within the android. You just can’t retune.

Thing is, if Sonos had never invented Trueplay and added it as a free upgrade on iOS a few years back, you would probably be delighted with your new Sonos product.  Trueplay sometimes makes little or no difference - it depends on the room.  I haven’t got round to tuning my Arc yet, but love the sound.

Shame you won’t be buying more Sonos - you will miss out on so much.

I use Android and have suggested an external mike as a solution too.

I also got a cheap Apple dingus off ebay to solve my TruePlay issues.

I long ago learned to solve Sonos issues myself when possible instead of waiting for Sonos to get to them. Sometimes I’m using my fix for years (SMBv1) or (TruePlay) sometimes Sonos fixes it quickly.

My goal is to enjoy my Sonos as much as possible with minimal aggravation, not to get Sonos to do stuff.

Some report little difference in the sound, but I found it made a huge difference to my Play 5 probably due to it’s siting which is not ideal acoustically. 

Unfortunately the person whose phone I borrowed to do set up Trueplay lives in France, so is unlikely to visit soon, and I lost the Trueplay setting when I had the unit repaired.

I suspect that Sonos will now rely on the built in mics in more modern kit, and will hope that the issue simply goes away.

There is a difference in an apologist and one who is simply acknowledging the way things are.

It is not being an apologist by explaining (to the best we can know) why things are as they are.

Sonos is the way Sonos is, nothing a small number of customers complaining do is going to change that. Again, not apologist, just acknowledging reality after years of experience.

Nothing wrong with complaining, I do my share (did a lot more when I was in the beta program too) but I have learned not to expect too much in the way of results or changes.

With that attitude I am much happier and less frustrated.

Hi @ihavoc, thanks for reaching out to the Sonos Community.

While it may not be specified on the Arc page that an iOS device is required for Trueplay, you can find here a list of Trueplay compatible devices, and it’s also stated on the main TruePlay page that an iOS device is required - that being said I’ll be happy to pass on your feedback to make it a little more obvious.

Regarding the different models of each iPhone line having different microphones - while this is true, the number of different models of phone running Android operating systems is on a different scale (a quick Google search showed 24,000 different models in 2015), with potentially thousands of different models of microphone installed, and different combinations of microphone, OS, and other hardware components. While we would love to bring Trueplay support to all Sonos systems, accounting for that level of variability in a process which requires precise measurements like Trueplay is unfortunately not feasible.

I do agree though that bringing Trueplay to non-iOS households (like my own) would be a great improvement, and hopefully it’s something that will be possible in the future.

Hi everyone. Trying to skip over if it is right or not for Sonos to not have trueplay for Android. I did just get my first Sonos product which is an ARC. We have no Apple devices in our house but I am hoping to ask a neighbor to borrow theirs to do the one time trueplay tuning. That being said, what minimum iPhone should they have, and what would they need to do on their end before letting me borrow the phone? I am assuming that they need to download the Sonos App, then I just need to log into my account and find the trueplay setting in the app. Is that correct? Anything else?

Most of what you’re asking is covered in the FAQ. 

Yes, you’d just need to download the app on their device, log in to your Sonos account, and do the process. Once it’s there, it sticks on the speakers memory, like most everything else, and you can turn it on or off using your Android device. 

Thank you @Airgetlam seems simple enough. Not ideal but certainly not horrible since you only have to do it once.

Yeah… I figured. 

also the small matter of giving them access to your wifi too. Also don’t forget to revoke their access and remove the app before giving the phine back otherwose they’ll be able to control your Sonos system! 

They need to be on your wifi. Remember after tuning to remove your wifi credentials from their phone after doing trueplay. 
Their iPhone needs to be a 6 or later running ios 11 or later. 
Install the Sonos app and if on your wifi it should find your system, when prompted connect to existing system .  You don’t need to sign in to perform trueplay.

 Once done disconnect from your wifi and remove the wifi credentials.  Remove the app if you want too, it can’t reconnect to your system without your wifi credentials anyway.

 Good luck.  In some rooms I’ve found trueplay to make big positive difference, mainly taking the boom out of the sound .   Some rooms it makes little difference.  The biggest benefit for me is the way it tamed the Sub.

Yes, or until I rearrange something. Truth to be told, I have some  other audio hardware that needs an iOS device, and my borrowed (stolen from my kids) iPad 3 is getting a bit long in the tooth. Time to upgrade to a 6th generation I think…  

I think SONOS can just make 2 microphones for Trueplay, one with USB type-c and the other with lightning...

Just as they've probably been doing all these years for every iPhone/iPad that Apple launched.

It’s a pity the mic in the Sonos Roam couldn’t do this I think, but there are perhaps some privacy issues preventing it.

I don’t know, Danny. Given the retirement of all non-music hardware (dock, controllers) Sonos has made, I wonder if that may have made them skittish. Although you could argue that such a device is a more natural extension of the sound process. Given that I happen to have multiple iOS devices that all function for this purpose, it’s not been something I’ve been overly worried about, but I do understand the desire from others. 

I’d have to say the chances of a mic would be higher if I were the Product person, as there is technically no ‘software’ that would be on the mic that could ever potentially run out of memory, I would think all of the software would be on the speakers. 

Not sure the price point of such a device makes a ton of sense, though. It would be, I suspect, a low cost item to manufacture, but all the ancillary costs might drive it up. But hard to get to $150 in my mind. However, I concur with your potential stumbling block for Android users. 

It kind of makes me wish they’d never released it for iOS in the first place, or messaged it better. It’s just not a requirement to have good sounding speakers. It can help in some situations, but so many people think it should be the ‘silver bullet’ that must be done or else they’re missing out on something ‘special’. 
 

Interesting. That certainly increases the complexity of the system function , to appropriately implement for Android. Although if they were to do something akin to pulling the processing back to the system, rather than the controller device itself, they might be able to drop the iOS specific software, and maintain a single process… it’s fun to speculate about something that will most likely never occur, since it’s hard to be ‘wrong’. 

And thank you for the link. I was struck, particularly, while reading through it, with this paragraph, which perhaps explains why speakers with mics are not potentially the best devices for dealing with the entire system, rather than their individual speaker. 

A single microphone-position measurement will scramble the problems caused by the speaker location with the problems associated with that specific measurement location. That’s why corrections are best made based on measurements taken in many places in the room, and why the graph above shows room-averaged measurements.

Further proof that just searching on Sonos’ own site has substantial benefits ;)

Great article.  I understand the aspect that a single point measurement, while increasing audio quality at the measurement location, can actually make it sound worse every where else.  I still think that it could be useful to be useful for the cases where you wish to optimize for a specific location, such as a theatre room or similar.  Or, in a room where there are multiple seating areas, no so much to deal with volume issues, but with timing issues, so left and right channel audio reaches the mic location at the same time.

But, I suspect I don’t understand this as well as I think do...and I don’t think I understand it all that well already.