Can people stop complaining about DTS?

djsgrant,

I would love to see Sonos produce a new centre front speaker to replace the PlayBar with the ability to add a Sub and four 'separate' surrounds.

To get 'virtual' Dolby Atmos, it would be nice if the surrounds were also all capable of 'upward firing' a separate channel and the whole room sound calibrated via trueplay tuning.

I’m not talking more devices than what you maybe want to see in a room, just that the surround speakers can be separated out from the centre and be able to fire separate audio channels upwards, aswell as outwards.

That’s what I would prefer to see and maybe bypass DTS altogether.

I think this topic is frankly ridiculous.

Sonos has a lot of Home Cinema booths set up in retail stores worldwide, in which they advertise their expensive playbar-sub-two rears as a complete home cinema system. What they don't tell you is that if you buy one, you are severly restricting yourself in terms of content you can play on your system.

The core of the problem is not that dolby digital 5.1 does not sound good or immersive. It's that your Sonos system it is unable to play a lot of common audio sources that feed into a typical home cinema system.

For crying out loud more than 80% of Blu-rays have DTS audio tracks. If you have a 4k / HDR television, and you want to experience ultra HD bluray 4k content, which is vastly superior in terms of visual quality to what Netflix streams, unless you have a very expensive blu-ray player that transcodes, you will have either stereo or no sound.

This is also foregoing the possibility that streaming services will move to higher fidelity sound codecs such as DTS and DD TrueHD in the coming years (which they will). That would mean that unless you get a transcoding device, you and your Sonos home cinema system will be stuck in stereo.

If you are okay with getting stereo sound in 2018 from your $1600 Sonos Home Cinema system, be my guest. I'm not, which is why, like others, I'm trying to get my voice heard. We are locked in the ecosystem, switching costs are high, which is why Sonos is getting away with this kind of stuff.

I seriously do not get why you are complaining about people raising this issue. If it does not affect you, good for you. This issue is a big issue for alot of people though.

If you think Sonos is making the decision to not support modern audio codecs and connections out of practical, design and 'love for audio' considerations, you are kidding yourself. Sonos is gearing up for an IPO and has in the past year laid of plenty of employees. They are pursuing a fat bottom line on the short run. That is exactly why they are targeting the technically unsavvy affluent consumer, looking for a premium home cinema system.

I think this topic is frankly ridiculous.

Sonos has a lot of Home Cinema booths set up in retail stores worldwide, in which they advertise their expensive playbar-sub-two rears as a complete home cinema system. What they don't tell you is that if you buy one, you are severly restricting yourself in terms of content you can play on your system.

The core of the problem is not that dolby digital 5.1 does not sound good or immersive. It's that your Sonos system it is unable to play a lot of common audio sources that feed into a typical home cinema system.

For crying out loud more than 80% of Blu-rays have DTS audio tracks. If you have a 4k / HDR television, and you want to experience ultra HD bluray 4k content, which is vastly superior in terms of visual quality to what Netflix streams, unless you have a very expensive blu-ray player that transcodes, you will have either stereo or no sound.

This is also foregoing the possibility that streaming services will move to higher fidelity sound codecs such as DTS and DD TrueHD in the coming years (which they will). That would mean that unless you get a transcoding device, you and your Sonos home cinema system will be stuck in stereo.

If you are okay with getting stereo sound in 2018 from your $1600 Sonos Home Cinema system, be my guest. I'm not, which is why, like others, I'm trying to get my voice heard. We are locked in the ecosystem, switching costs are high, which is why Sonos is getting away with this kind of stuff.

I seriously do not get why you are complaining about people raising this issue. If it does not affect you, good for you. This issue is a big issue for alot of people though.

If you think Sonos is making the decision to not support modern audio codecs and connections out of practical, design and 'love for audio' considerations, you are kidding yourself. Sonos is gearing up for an IPO and has in the past year laid of plenty of employees. They are pursuing a fat bottom line on the short run. That is exactly why they are targeting the technically unsavvy affluent consumer, looking for a premium home cinema system.

Bravo, succinctly put.

I think this topic is frankly ridiculous.

Sonos has a lot of Home Cinema booths set up in retail stores worldwide, in which they advertise their expensive playbar-sub-two rears as a complete home cinema system. What they don't tell you is that if you buy one, you are severly restricting yourself in terms of content you can play on your system.

The core of the problem is not that dolby digital 5.1 does not sound good or immersive. It's that your Sonos system it is unable to play a lot of common audio sources that feed into a typical home cinema system.

For crying out loud more than 80% of Blu-rays have DTS audio tracks. If you have a 4k / HDR television, and you want to experience ultra HD bluray 4k content, which is vastly superior in terms of visual quality to what Netflix streams, unless you have a very expensive blu-ray player that transcodes, you will have either stereo or no sound.

This is also foregoing the possibility that streaming services will move to higher fidelity sound codecs such as DTS and DD TrueHD in the coming years (which they will). That would mean that unless you get a transcoding device, you and your Sonos home cinema system will be stuck in stereo.

If you are okay with getting stereo sound in 2018 from your $1600 Sonos Home Cinema system, be my guest. I'm not, which is why, like others, I'm trying to get my voice heard. We are locked in the ecosystem, switching costs are high, which is why Sonos is getting away with this kind of stuff.

I seriously do not get why you are complaining about people raising this issue. If it does not affect you, good for you. This issue is a big issue for alot of people though.

If you think Sonos is making the decision to not support modern audio codecs and connections out of practical, design and 'love for audio' considerations, you are kidding yourself. Sonos is gearing up for an IPO and has in the past year laid of plenty of employees. They are pursuing a fat bottom line on the short run. That is exactly why they are targeting the technically unsavvy affluent consumer, looking for a premium home cinema system.

Bravo, succinctly put.

What they said x100 😉

I think the issue is around those that know how the tech works and those that don't. It's not unreasonable to think that a system that can be built and is sold as 5.1 will work with a blurry player and reproduce 5.1. I was happy enough to buy a new player that could convert dts to dd but it shouldn't be necessary. I'm not worried about any differences in sound quality or effects but Sonos sells itself as a simple to use system that means owners can plug and play as far as possible. They should pay the extra licensees fee which I understand is the issue with not supporting dts? and support their customers better.

To the starter of this thread, I could not disagree with you more.

I would buy SONOS (I nearly did because their UI is good) if it had at least basic DTS support, as almost all of my Blurays are DTS! These DTS Licenses in bulk purchases to OEMs are not expensive and I've seen this daft argument from manufacturers like AUDIOLAB that did the 8000AP and 8200AP before...

...guess what, because they refuse to implement the basics of decoding high-def formats natively (instead rely on your Player to convert to LPCM for them so they don't have to pay the puny License fee) they have discontinued their line of AVP due to nobody buying their corner-cutting barebones hardware to maximise profits.

To the starter of this thread, I could not disagree with you more.

How true!

For me personally, the Apple TV 4K is the perfect device in combination with Sonos as it can convert any audio codec into a Sonos compatible multichannel format (assuming the source has multichannel of course). I'm using the "Infuse" app which is capable of playing any movies/content (up to 4K HDR) with DTS HD/Dolby+ sound, the AppleTV will convert it on the fly in AC3 5.1 (if you change the audio settings once). Of course it also works with Dolby Digital Plus from the Netflix app.

Another advantage of the Apple TV is the built-in AirPlay 2 support so the "old" Playbar even profits more. There are HDMI switches that support 4K (@60Hz), HDR, ARC, CEC and have a built-in optical audio output (SPDIF) so when using one of these you can even use the Apple TV on the Playbar without turning on the TV (e.g. for music/AirPlay 2), I'm using a Vorke HD41PRO.

Concerning BluRay: are there really BluRays that have exclusive DTS audio? I've never seen one, all my BluRays have a backward compatible Dolby 5.1 audio track. But even if there are such BluRays one has to buy a player that can convert it on the fly (Stereo is not an option for me). My PlayStation 4 does it for example as well as some Samsung players.

Long story short: I was fully aware that Sonos can only handle AC3 5.1 before I bought all my equipment (many years ago) and I'm quite happy that there are possibilities to have at least 5.1 sound in any condition (if the source supports it of course). I bought the Apple TV 4 for 140€ and (for me) it's worth every penny - also quite cheap in relationship to Sonos speakers. It even supports Dolby Vision and therefore is the perfect companion for my LG OLED TV (but this has nothing to do with Sonos). Not to mention all the available apps (even the german SkyQ) nor the HomeKit Hub functionality.

In order to get a DD 5.1 stream from all my films, I've resorted to using KODI installed on an Amazon Fire TV box, with KODI set to transcode all non DD films to DD. For my 4K films I have to use the built in video / photo player in my LG OLED55B7 in order to correctly process the HDR signal. For 4K films with DTS MA, I've had to use EAC3To to extract the DTS-HD soundtrack, create a DD 5.1 track from it, then remux the film to include the DD5.1 track so I can select this from the LG player. Complete ball ache, but gets my round the ridiculous Sonos processing limitations as they stand.

Just to add, most DD 5.1 soundtracks are mixed at 448 or 640kb/s, where as a DTS core soundtrack will be closer to 1.5Mb/s. DTS Core will automatically be extracted from a DTS MA soundtrack by most TV players if DTS MA is not acceptable and will be passed through an Optical connection perfectly fine at this bitrate. So by Sonos restricting their equipment to DD 5.1 signals only, we are effectively being forced to listen to inferior sound quality from our movie collections for the sake of the cost of a DTS decoder license.