Not sure where to post but I need to chime in. I love this forum, but a question for all the complainers of DTS not being supported. Did you actually research before you purchased this very expensive equipment? I have read so many people whining “I’m going to return my Sonos” or I’m selling my gear” or “wahhhhhh I’m not buying Sonos unless they give me DTS”. I spent hours researching before I even went to the store to give it a listen. It very clear and in no way hidden that this equipment is geared towards streaming media and music. It clearly states that DTS is not supported. To be honest, I didn’t even know people still watch DVDs! Wait....are VCRs still around too?? People think that Sonos is not listening. I believe they are listening and their answer is NO. They have a very specific brand with one goal in mind. Add music easily throughout your whole home. I think the 5.1 is a bonus but it’s not their claim to fame. I have the 5.1 set up and a couple Play 5s and could not be happier with them. Movies AND Music sound great.
Please stop complaining. If the equipment is not exactly what you want, don’t buy it and please don’t whine that you would buy it “if”. Should I call Apple and tell them I’ll buy thousands of dollars of their brand if they “would simply integrate windows 10” to their interface? Ok, enough venting for 1 day. Phew, that felt good! Bring on the hateful comments, I can handle it.
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I will say the audio bug bit me at a young age. I heard my first car audio demo vehicle when I was 13. I am now 40. I worked for one of the biggest audio manufacturers and I was even an IASCA judge for 3 years. I am not saying I am a guru but I feel I have an advantage over your average joe. I have literally owned dozens and dozens of home theater setups starting with $50 “home theater in a box” to a full blown Snell Acoustics 5.1 set up and everything in between. My last set up before this was a Samsung HWK950 wireless atmos system. I had nothing but issues with the Samsung and replaced it with Sonos. I will say the Sonos is my favorite set up ever. In this price range you will not find any component system that sounds nice or is easier to set up. I have had the Sonos gear for a short time and I have had ZERO issues. Not even a hiccup. I do not watch dvds I only stream content and the experience with movies is more than enjoyable. Maybe all the people wishing for dts support should spend $50-100 dollars on a streaming stick or device and see what they are missing. I am sure any movie you have in your collection will be available to you and if you do not agree that the sound is outstanding then frankly, there might be something wrong with you! Buy the gear directly from Sonos and a stick from amazon and you’ll have plenty of time to try it and return it.
What I really want is a SuperConnect Box that sends out signals to all Sonos speakers to create 5.1 (like using 3 Play:5s for front, center, right). And Dolby Atmos compatibility - that would be incredible.
Yep. You and I have been in agreement on that for some time. The logic for the system needs to be offloaded to a SuperConnect as you said, and it needs multiple HDMI inputs along with a complete decoder suite. Make an entry level SuperConnect that gets us up to DTS/DD+ which would preserve everyone's investment in the various Play speakers. Make a hifi SuperConnectHT that gets us Dolby True HD/Atmos/DTS:X, with software upgrades available for the inevitable new standard that will emerge just after these go to market.
Ultimately, Sonos could offer height speakers that add on to the Plays, and perhaps a new Playbar that offers the same.
Rendering someone's entire BluRay collection useless is borderline class action lawsuit for an audio system that is sold as a home audio entertainment system. Picture the scene: everyone sits down to watch a BluRay and there's no audio once the movie starts. Wow...what a great sound system. (And for some reason my Sony BluRay player is not successfully converting the DTS to PCM so I'm truly stuck.)
Maybe it's just me, but when I'm looking for a product which has feature X I'll scan the specs to explicitly look for X. Strange, I know.
It's a shame, as it is a reason people will move away from sonos in their "theatre/main room", and then it's not whole house sonos anymore.
Still if gives good techy reasons for playbar2
Still if gives good techy reasons for playbar2
Amen!! Another rational person who lives in the “real” world. :D
If you only knew who you were replying to . . . 😉
I see it both ways. I definitely agree that it's rather wise to do research before buying any tech these days. You just can't assume features. At the same time though, if I see an optical output on my tv, and an optical input on the PLAYBAR, I expect that they're compatible. I sort of feel that an average customer shouldn't have to know more than that before making a purchase.
In a way, this is an industry problem more than a Sonos problem. On one hand, it would be great if a new codec came with a new type of connection. That way there would be no doubt about compatibility. Of course, the downside would be all new cables and such for the customer to buy, as well as no firmware upgrades to support a new codec. It's growing pains.
Although I already have my setup, I have thought about upgrading to a 4K. If I start looking, it's going to be annoying that I'll have to limit my choices by what will work with the PLAYBAR, or possibly have some complex work around that limits the ease of use. Essentially, I'm fine now, but I certainly would be in favor of making the Sonos as compatible as possible.
In a way, this is an industry problem more than a Sonos problem. On one hand, it would be great if a new codec came with a new type of connection. That way there would be no doubt about compatibility. Of course, the downside would be all new cables and such for the customer to buy, as well as no firmware upgrades to support a new codec. It's growing pains.
Although I already have my setup, I have thought about upgrading to a 4K. If I start looking, it's going to be annoying that I'll have to limit my choices by what will work with the PLAYBAR, or possibly have some complex work around that limits the ease of use. Essentially, I'm fine now, but I certainly would be in favor of making the Sonos as compatible as possible.
Yet another Sonos buyer who can't handle any criticism of their choices. Talk abut thinking. You posted a topic complaint you don't like seeing criticisms. Is the irony totally lost on you?
Nobody is forcing you to read the very justified complaints about Sonos Home theater gear not support modern formats or connectivity.
This is Sonos' market to lose and judging by the complaints and returns they are being very slow to respond. There are many alternatives now.
Nobody is forcing you to read the very justified complaints about Sonos Home theater gear not support modern formats or connectivity.
This is Sonos' market to lose and judging by the complaints and returns they are being very slow to respond. There are many alternatives now.
For what it is and what we use it for the Playbar in 5.1 works perfectly well.
Yes, probably what all sensible people did (or something like it) - BUT we should not have had to find such workarounds Sonos should have supported more than one input option, after all the original ZonePlayers did.
This post has come up many many times on this forum, and my observations are as follows:
It's kinda hard to understand how so many people come here and post something akin to "I just spent 10K on wiring my whole house for Sonos and just realised it doesn't play my 24-bit FLAC files or my DTS-only Blu-Rays. THESE ARE THE ONLY TWO THINGS I LISTEN TO AND WATCH!" Basically, it's weird we have so many mega rich people who drop this kinda cash on a whim and then moan about it not doing the things they didn't bother to research it for.
If you're seriously into Home Theatre I cannot understand for one second how Sonos is the product for you. It is a convenience play and I've mentioned before it quite clearly is focused on music streaming first (which it is by far the best in the market at, and "Home Theatre" second. The fact that it maxes out at DD5.1 and can't support DD Plus should tell you all you need to know about where it stands.
That said, I do have some sympathy for the average Joe who doesn't know DD from DTS, shells out 1K for a Playbar and Sub, takes it home, hooks everything up, and then realises he can't watch his Star Wars DVD (and subsequently gets forced into the parallel universe of audio codecs).
Sonos absolutely must be R&D'ing an HDMI Playbar, there's just no other way to push that line forwards, and I maintain my belief that Sonos will just buy out Denon's flagging HEOS range which can do everything codec-wise that people seem to ask for.
My original post about 6 months ago still holds:
This is an interesting thread, but there are lots of things in here that I don't agree with, and seem just pure conjecture. To caveat, I have both a "proper" wired 5.1 AV setup in my main TV room, as well as Sonos throughout the house (including 2x 5.0 Sonos setups). So I feel fairly well placed to make comparisons.
Firstly, a Sonos 5.1 setup is crazy expensive. Just looking at the online shop, a Playbar/Playbase, Sub and 2 surrounds (Play 1s) costs £1,736. You could easily spend that money on a wired setup, as well as an AV Pro to come round, trunk the speaker cabling, set everything up and then have at least £200-300 left to spare. It would support all sound formats, and I would say arguably give you slightly better sound (but it's negligible).
But set a Sonos surround system up, feed it a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal and it does a great job (as it should do, because it's crazy expensive). You can get a decent amount of bass without the Sub too (quite why it needs to cost £600 is really beyond me). So the "low quality Dolby Digital" comment is just pointless and incorrect. Sonos has superb software and the technology of SonosNet is fantastic, but comes at a hefty cost.
Saying "I actually use fewer wires" for a Denos/Q Acoustics setup just means you didn't do your research properly. Any LG TV will pass on a 5.1 signal either from an internal or external source (and most Samsung or Sony ones do too), and differentiating between "thick" and "thin" cabling is seriously clutching.
I fully agree that you can have issues if you're a serial DVD/Blu-Ray watcher, and I agree you can get pesky lip-sync issues. I'm wondering how many folk bought the last Star Wars films (DTS only for the main soundtrack, DD for description only!), plugged it in and realised they couldn't hear anything (although out the box, most TV/Sonos setups seem to default to 2.0 anyway). Lipsync issues though, in my experience, are more down to the TV manufacturer than Sonos (but it absolutely is a pain).
It is patently obvious that home theatre was an afterthought for Sonos, else there is no other reason to begin with a purely optical soundbar and charge £650. If I was a betting man, I'd give it a 90-95% chance that Sonos is R&D'ing a HDMI Soundbar. There is just no other way to take that product line forwards, but how they would make it work for surround sound is another thing. I'm guessing there would be serious bandwidth issues for anything beyond DD5.1 with non-wired surrounds.
And just 2 points to make to the OP - if we want to start talking about so-called "true" AV setups, then things such as clear speech shouldn't even be an issue and you should be watching everything in Pure Direct mode. If you're having to make adjustments for this, it's not setup properly in the first place (save for the odd show/film with really bad mixing). Also, Sonos quite literally has a Speech Enhancement function! And buying speakers such as the (excellent) Q Acoustics ones and then quite literally dumping them all next to each other on your TV stand with little space between them (thus, little audio separation) and at a low level which must be way below your ear level, is just wrong - you might as well have just got a Playbar.
I also must say the people who seem to be worried about sound formats, etc IMO is a vast minority of overall Sonos users. Every single other person I know who has it simply connects to their WiFi and is done with it. Most don't even know about DTS, DD+, Atmos, etc. And if you care that much about it, I find it odd you'd run through all these hoops to get surround sound and not want a "proper" wired setup in the first place.
Sonos is a music streamer and simple soundbar first, and an extension into Home Theatre second. It's the best in the market at the first, and does an admirable (if very very costly) job at the second.
It's kinda hard to understand how so many people come here and post something akin to "I just spent 10K on wiring my whole house for Sonos and just realised it doesn't play my 24-bit FLAC files or my DTS-only Blu-Rays. THESE ARE THE ONLY TWO THINGS I LISTEN TO AND WATCH!" Basically, it's weird we have so many mega rich people who drop this kinda cash on a whim and then moan about it not doing the things they didn't bother to research it for.
If you're seriously into Home Theatre I cannot understand for one second how Sonos is the product for you. It is a convenience play and I've mentioned before it quite clearly is focused on music streaming first (which it is by far the best in the market at, and "Home Theatre" second. The fact that it maxes out at DD5.1 and can't support DD Plus should tell you all you need to know about where it stands.
That said, I do have some sympathy for the average Joe who doesn't know DD from DTS, shells out 1K for a Playbar and Sub, takes it home, hooks everything up, and then realises he can't watch his Star Wars DVD (and subsequently gets forced into the parallel universe of audio codecs).
Sonos absolutely must be R&D'ing an HDMI Playbar, there's just no other way to push that line forwards, and I maintain my belief that Sonos will just buy out Denon's flagging HEOS range which can do everything codec-wise that people seem to ask for.
My original post about 6 months ago still holds:
Firstly, a Sonos 5.1 setup is crazy expensive. Just looking at the online shop, a Playbar/Playbase, Sub and 2 surrounds (Play 1s) costs £1,736. You could easily spend that money on a wired setup, as well as an AV Pro to come round, trunk the speaker cabling, set everything up and then have at least £200-300 left to spare. It would support all sound formats, and I would say arguably give you slightly better sound (but it's negligible).
But set a Sonos surround system up, feed it a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal and it does a great job (as it should do, because it's crazy expensive). You can get a decent amount of bass without the Sub too (quite why it needs to cost £600 is really beyond me). So the "low quality Dolby Digital" comment is just pointless and incorrect. Sonos has superb software and the technology of SonosNet is fantastic, but comes at a hefty cost.
Saying "I actually use fewer wires" for a Denos/Q Acoustics setup just means you didn't do your research properly. Any LG TV will pass on a 5.1 signal either from an internal or external source (and most Samsung or Sony ones do too), and differentiating between "thick" and "thin" cabling is seriously clutching.
I fully agree that you can have issues if you're a serial DVD/Blu-Ray watcher, and I agree you can get pesky lip-sync issues. I'm wondering how many folk bought the last Star Wars films (DTS only for the main soundtrack, DD for description only!), plugged it in and realised they couldn't hear anything (although out the box, most TV/Sonos setups seem to default to 2.0 anyway). Lipsync issues though, in my experience, are more down to the TV manufacturer than Sonos (but it absolutely is a pain).
It is patently obvious that home theatre was an afterthought for Sonos, else there is no other reason to begin with a purely optical soundbar and charge £650. If I was a betting man, I'd give it a 90-95% chance that Sonos is R&D'ing a HDMI Soundbar. There is just no other way to take that product line forwards, but how they would make it work for surround sound is another thing. I'm guessing there would be serious bandwidth issues for anything beyond DD5.1 with non-wired surrounds.
And just 2 points to make to the OP - if we want to start talking about so-called "true" AV setups, then things such as clear speech shouldn't even be an issue and you should be watching everything in Pure Direct mode. If you're having to make adjustments for this, it's not setup properly in the first place (save for the odd show/film with really bad mixing). Also, Sonos quite literally has a Speech Enhancement function! And buying speakers such as the (excellent) Q Acoustics ones and then quite literally dumping them all next to each other on your TV stand with little space between them (thus, little audio separation) and at a low level which must be way below your ear level, is just wrong - you might as well have just got a Playbar.
I also must say the people who seem to be worried about sound formats, etc IMO is a vast minority of overall Sonos users. Every single other person I know who has it simply connects to their WiFi and is done with it. Most don't even know about DTS, DD+, Atmos, etc. And if you care that much about it, I find it odd you'd run through all these hoops to get surround sound and not want a "proper" wired setup in the first place.
Sonos is a music streamer and simple soundbar first, and an extension into Home Theatre second. It's the best in the market at the first, and does an admirable (if very very costly) job at the second.
Nothing hateful but Movies make more money than music does and influence more people. Decoding DTS would be easy to do and an HDMI input/throughput would be eve more spectacular and they would sell millions of items. I am like Steve Jobs at Apple. He wasn't an engineer that designed to machines, but he understood what people really wanted. I am I that groove. Music is great to listen to and have in the background like 'elevator music', but niching beats a great film, with incredible spacious sound that would get us right into the scenes. That could be easily set up for just a few bucks and would stop all the issues, complaints and make Sonos even more money! That is what hey want, isn't it?:?
So, the answer to the question posed by this thread is "no".
Well perhaps "no" or "not until the issue is addressed and solved", be that by Sonos or industry standards changing. :D
Given this, can the "Sonos does what I need" brigade stop trying to shut down legitimate topics on these forums? Unfortunately I suspect that answer to this questions is also "No" or "not until everyone agrees with us that Sonos is perfect". 😛
Well, I have my Sonos system 2-3 years, I really liked it...
But I just buy new TV (Philips 65oled873/12), and now the app says "Geluid van tv niet ondersteund" (Sound of tv not supported), think my tv give DTS-HD, I can't change to dolby in settings TV.
The strange thing is, I still have sound from my sonos but if it was not, my Sonos had to go...
Anyway, next time I buy new sound system, it will NOT be Sonos, and the only reasons are, no hdmi, no DTS, my sound system must work with all, I don't want problems if you buy new TV or new blue-ray or whatever just because Sonos don't work with all...
I am not complaining about it, but Sonos has the right to know this, so that's why I post this here...
But I just buy new TV (Philips 65oled873/12), and now the app says "Geluid van tv niet ondersteund" (Sound of tv not supported), think my tv give DTS-HD, I can't change to dolby in settings TV.
The strange thing is, I still have sound from my sonos but if it was not, my Sonos had to go...
Anyway, next time I buy new sound system, it will NOT be Sonos, and the only reasons are, no hdmi, no DTS, my sound system must work with all, I don't want problems if you buy new TV or new blue-ray or whatever just because Sonos don't work with all...
I am not complaining about it, but Sonos has the right to know this, so that's why I post this here...
I don't weigh on the debate much but DTS support would make my setup perfect. My 4K bluray player doesn't convert DTS-HD to 5.1. I hadn't thought of upgrading some of my old DVDs and some don't have ATMOS which the player converts OK.
i'm pretty sure this is a case of Sonos screwed themselves by standardising on optical (which is old and dead) and it doesn't have the bandwidth to carry a decent signal like HDMI does.
what frustrates me is they won't update their otherwise excellent hardware to use a connection medium that doesn't suck.
what frustrates me is they won't update their otherwise excellent hardware to use a connection medium that doesn't suck.
I understand that to add DTS to PlayBars and PlayBases would cost Sonos approx. £50 in licensing fees to DTS for each unit updated. This would apply for each new unit sold and all previously sold units receiving the updates. Therefore the overall cost to Sonos would be quite substantial and I believe this to be the main stumbling block on providing the update. A bit disappointing when you consider these products are not exactly cheap to purchase and far cheaper brands add DTS as standard.
So it was everybody else’s fault and only Sonos got it right? Unlikely.
Thanks Paul. I have SkyQ and it is excellent. I doesn’t always show what I want to watch. I also may be old fashioned but I do like to collect the odd classic movie on DVD for keeps. I suppose my overall point is that the Sonos Playbar/base shouldn’t be for audiofiles who know their DTS from their elbow, it should just work. And for that amount of cash, £1700, it should work BETTER than anything else in this sector.
@djsgrant - If you live in UK you could look into SkyQ. Your slow broadband speed will not matter, as it downloads UHD catch-up content onto it's hardrive, could be overnight, then you could watch it when ever you choose.
Do not take it personally, that poster makes a living out of detracting from the point in order to "back Sonos" to the hilt!
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.
DVD and Blu-Ray sales are still very strong & there's no harm in including a codec if you personally don't use it.
I do believe that in order to increase their revenue, Sonos will have to enter new markets or increase their market share in existing markets like home cinema. If they are serious about increasing their market share in home cinema, I predict that Sonos will eventually release a proper Dolby Atmos soundbar with support for DTS Virtual:X as well.
Please stop complaining. If the equipment is not exactly what you want, don’t buy it and please don’t whine that you would buy it “if”. Should I call Apple and tell them I’ll buy thousands of dollars of their brand if they “would simply integrate windows 10” to their interface? Ok, enough venting for 1 day. Phew, that felt good! Bring on the hateful comments, I can handle it.
In my own experience, I had no idea what DTS was when I got into Sonos. I was in hifi audio in the previous century, and I got out when Dolby Digital was still called AC-3. At the time, I could get a perfect soundstage out of a pair of high quality B&W speakers and an excellent amp; with a DVD player source I had a home theater that my audiophile friends agreed was worth more than any multi-channel system they'd heard.
Years later that system was damaged, and as my priorities had changed I replaced it with a multi-channel Sony AVR and a bunch of polk speakers. The system was bland, to say the least. When Blu-ray players became affordable I got on that train. Sometimes I'd play with the various sound settings and experiment with different processing, picking out halls and such. Once in a while the DTS light would engage on the front panel, and I'd notice... nothing. It wasn't appreciably different from regular Dolby Digital. It just seemed like typical multi-channel audio. I remember reading that DTS vs DD5.1 was somewhat of a format war, and that Dolby was entrenched and would likely win. Most discs had both, it was a non-issue. So I forgot about it. I never liked the Sony system I had, not a bit, but I figured I was done with hifi so I just lived with it.
Years later, a customer demo'd his new Play:1 for me. I was astounded by how the thing sounded, especially the mids. Vocals just shimmered. I shopped around and found that there was a "complete" home theater setup offered by Sonos. The price was ok so I decided to go for it. Once I got the bugs out and went through half a dozen updates, I'm pretty well satisfied.
Except for one small thing: at some point, many studios switched from DD5.1 to DTS on their Blu-rays. I was pretty surprised to find that movies I had listened to in multi-channel on the Sony system were now playing in stereo on the Sonos. Watching the insanely well-produced Skyfall, particularly the battle at the end, I should have been hearing explosions and glass-breakage all around me, but instead it was crammed into the soundbar along with the voices. The exquisite soundtrack was being crushed.
So in response to your question "did you actually research before you purchased this very expensive equipment?", I had no idea that DTS was still around, much less that it had very nearly taken over the Blu-ray software market. I had no idea Sonos didn't handle DTS. I never thought about it.
Now personally, its not going to get me to throw the system away, or sell it. Its fine when I'm on my Apple TV4K, and the audio comes in from Netflix as DD5.1. It just sucks that I have to shop for an overpriced player now that converts DD to DTS. It also sucks that Netflix is moving towards DD+, which Sonos doesn't support - but could. While a case has been made that its a bandwidth constraint that keeps DTS off Sonos (which could be solved by using HDMI input), it doesn't appear likely that same restriction is what keeps us from getting DD+ 7.1 audio. Will it ever happen?
I could certainly see a newer device that could do that, so that they could include all of the necessary license fees for all the speakers needed in the one device's price point. But I have to wonder at what price point that device would end up being at. There's an odd connection often between perceived size and functionality and the associated cost. It's not a hard and fast rule, mind you, at least in my mind, but it's there.
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