Arc microphone constantly turns off and off by itself

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arc microphone constantly turns off and off by itself with alexa and smart lg tv eARC connection.

arc volume control always works with tv.

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Corry PAnswer

Sonos Staff

Hi @hogan1 et al

We now recommend that anyone affected by this issue get in touch with our technical support team directly for a resolution. Thank you.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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J

Jonnydrama32

Avid Contributor I

I’ve just tried the switching process with Alexa…

"Alexa, play some music” - music plays and the mic stays on.

“Alexa, switch to TV mode on Living Room” - Arc switches to TV audio and mic stays on.

I repeated the above steps and the mic never goes off, stays on all the time.

Next I repeated the above with SVC

“Hey Sonos, play some music” - SVC responded “As you like…” (or ding earcon tone) and music plays and the mic stays on.

“Hey Sonos, switch to TV mode on Living Room” - Arc switches to TV audio and mic stays on.

The mic never goes off in my case.

So I was unable to reproduce the issue described.

Thanks for doing this. Since I have two Sonos-direct Arcs as does Hogan, and all four have this issue, it's pretty clear they have a QC issue. It's pretty damning that the Best Buy one I bought today cannot recreate the mic issue, nor can the one you own. I'm not even sure what to ask Sonos to do about it. If I ask for another replacement, I'll likely get another one from the same batch.

J

Jonnydrama32

Avid Contributor I

Just to add as far as these Support articles (below) are concerned there is no voice instruction to switch off a microphone on any Sonos product…

Here are the available SVC instructions…

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/list-of-voice-requests-for-sonos-voice-control

Here is some further information about Alexa and the basic instructions you can use with that assistant…

https://www.amazon.com/Sonos-Inc/dp/B072ML3N6K

And just for completion, here are the Google assistant basic instructions…

https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/7539710

No signs of anything that switches off a Sonos microphone and I’ve never seen it happen here. Maybe best to video the issue and pass that onto Sonos Support Staff next week and perhaps accompany things with a diagnostic report too.

Hope you can get the issues resolved. 👍

I have lots of video and diagnostics, but this has to be a hardware issue if Hogan and I got ours at the same time and all four have the same issue.

Ken_Griffiths

Yes, it does rather sound like a faulty batch as @ratty mentioned earlier - but perhaps see what the Support Staff may say when you provide them with the data next week. I guess they’ll need to investigate the matter and come back to yourselves.

buzz

Grand Maestro

The first four digits of the serial number indicates the month of manufacture. This can be a good indicator, unfortunately not proof, of units being from the same batch. Another indicator is given in Settings —> System —> About My System. Each unit indicates its version and modification level with the Series ID and Hardware Version fields. This is still not absolute proof of same batch because the units could be built on different days or assembly lines. It’s possible that a single assembly line staffer was not following procedures for a few days and all of the units processed by Jack or Jill, will malfunction at some point.

For this particular failure I suspect that there is a leakage path created by surface contamination resulting in a phantom “touch”. While it’s possible that this is external and potentially could be detected and eliminated at home, it’s more likely that this would be an internal issue. And, relative humidity could trigger the issue. Some years ago there was a very vexing issue with a product manufactured by an excellent European company. Samples intermittently experienced issues, but only when operated in very dry Arizona. Any misbehaving sample brought back to the lab performed normally.