Contributor I

is it expected for an Arc Ultra + Era 300 setup to always emit from thr arc ultra with lpcm 5.1 sources?

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My setup is an Arc Ultra with rear 300s and a sub gen 3, routed through earc from a Samsung s95f tv.

I am having a really hard time getting a useable surround sound balance when playing games on the ps5 or switch 2, which are both configured using lpcm 5.1 for positional surround with minimal latency.

I’ve narrowed down the main issue to the surround balancing that seems to occur between the Arc Ultra and the surround satellites, where the system seems to always want to use the arc to boost the surrounds even when it makes no sense. in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth for example, if I rotate the camera around so a sound source goes from directly in front of me to directly behind me I can hear it move from the center to the side and then to the back, except as it moves to the back the side is always firing just as loud as it was while the object was mostly in front of me so now the overall volume of the source is basically doubled as it comes out of multiple speakers.

truplay does nothing to meaningfully adjust this, using the surround volume slider only adjusts the volume emitting from the rears so you can technically balance it but then all your “rear” sounds are just coming from directly in front of you. Same deal for changing speaker distance settings with try play off.

you can see the issue in more isolation if you use the switch 2 audio testing option, where the left/center/right/sub test tones work great and are nicely isolated but the rear left and rear right tests have sound blasting 50/50 between the rear speakers and the front side speakers, as I guess they attempt to create more side sounds but it just ends up sounding both bad spatially and way louder than sounds that don’t have a rear element.

so is this normal and expected because of the Sonos software profile intentions or am I missing some simple method to actually make surround gaming enjoyable on a top of the line Sonos configuration?

side note, I’ve left atmos out of this because it has some other complexities to figure out in terms of balancing, isn’t available on switch 2, and has extra lag when passed through Samsung TVs such as mine which makes it a poor choice for ps5 gaming. Unfortunate but for now these devices work best when utilizing lpcm 5.1.

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Dorky

Lyricist I

I've got the same setup as yours but with a sub mini and era 100s. How did you make the switch 2 see your surround setup. In my case it only sees the setup as stereo in the audio test even though the surround actually works in ff7 remake. I have set the audio output to 5.1 in the settings, not auto or stereo and in game it works even though the audio test shows only that stereo is available.

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SMishraAuthor

Contributor I

I've got the same setup as yours but with a sub mini and era 100s. How did you make the switch 2 see your surround setup. In my case it only sees the setup as stereo in the audio test even though the surround actually works in ff7 remake. I have set the audio output to 5.1 in the settings, not auto or stereo and in game it works even though the audio test shows only that stereo is available.

Yeah the switch 2 claims to only see stereo compatible television but if you set it to LPCM 5.1 it will output that and the TV will pass it through, surround works in games and will also work in the audio testing screen even though it thinks it wont.

Try out the audio test and listen to each speaker, see if you get what I do where it tries to test the rear left/right speakers but a ton of sound comes out of the arc ultra right in front of you in addition to the rears.

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