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Immersive
Avid Contributor III
June 18, 2020
Question

Arc + surrounds Sonos(oneSLs) Review

So I finally received my Sonos Arc and One SLs  today.  Unfortunately, I will not get the sub for a couple of weeks.

 

As a first time Sonos owner, the setup was super easy And uneventful connecting the Arc and Ones together.  

 

I have an LG OLED B8 series TV with AppleTV  4K.  I mention this because I do not have eARC, so I do not get true Dolby Atmos (DA).  But I have noticed that plugging the Arc sound-bar into the HDMI ARC does NOT sound as good as plugging it into the optical and changing the the TV output to internal TV speakers + optical with DA and adaptive sound turned on.  I believe the is the lossy DA I have read about (basically Dolby digital+).   It is nice!   I do look forward to hearing true lossless DA at some point.

 

 

I have spent the past few hours on YouTube (with Apple TV in the HDMI ARC) and looking and listening to DA tests, samples, movie trailers and frequency tests.  As most have probably heard about the bass issues, yes I notice it and duplicate it.  Interestingly enough when running a freq test from 1hz through 200khz..  with volumes about 30% and starts at 1hz and slowly moves through the frequency, I literally can’t hear anything until about 35Hz (might be my hearing) but it is smooth throughout the freqs.  Running several times, I noticed starting about 40hz through 100hz and volume >50% the bass starts breaking up.  When listening to music, at about 50% volume, the bass starts to crack, break and fall off as the mods and highs continue to rise as volume rises.  Below 50% it’s sounds great!  Now that’s bad… Sonos definitely has screwed up.  However, I am hearing today they have identified an issue and hope to have a firmware update next week.  Keep in mind.. at 49% volume, it is still pretty loud.

 

so far, I have really enjoyed it.  However the phone app is taking a bit to get used to.  It isn’t that hard to figure out, still a bit of learning curve.

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12 replies

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jfrtwo
Trending Lyricist I
July 26, 2020

Correct!!  YouTube does NOT support 5.1.  Do not use test videos from YT, even if it says something related to Atmos in the title…… you’ll only disappoint yourself.  Remember to always check the what the ARC is receiving by checking it in the “About My System” page in the app.

 

-JR

    jimbo_hippo
    Trending Lyricist I
    July 27, 2020

    I find that for 5.1 surround with Apple TV, the SpeakerCheck app is much better for problem solving. I was setting up a third Sonos surround system comprising an Arc, sub and 2 x Play 1s this week. Whilst my Apple TV was configured correctly, the TV had a setting buried deep in the menu system for choosing between PCM or ‘auto’ (which in itself is an odd pair of choices) but only this app highlighted that I wasn’t getting true surround to the rears. It won’t help with Atmos since at time of writing, it doesn’t provide an Atmos test sequence but my ageing TV won’t let such signals through and my ATV is gen 4 non-4K so it’s fine fine for me. It has helped me speed up the configuration of all of my systems at some time or other and is well worth the few quid it costs. 

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