natural sound arc ultra

I don't know how to answer that, we just plugged our Arc, and now Arc Ultra in, set it up to link to the TV and listen to it. Never noticed any odd sounds or operation. We do use speech enhancement on some programming. 

Maybe if you explained what you meant by cinematic/theatrical? 

Hi Stanley,

So for example, the beam is more natural and crisp in dialogue. However the arc, the voices are fuller and contains more bass when speaking. Like the difference in watching at cinema compared to tv at home. So I wanted to ask if you can tone down the settings to be more natural in speech and in sounds compared to a fuller heavier tone.

Thanks

I think you have it backwards, the Arc does a good job of reproducing the source material. Smaller Sonos do a good job given the constraints on size and cost. TV speakers do the bare minimum.

Still you could tweak the audio controls to try and limit the sound if that is what you want.

You can try to low the bass setting maybe, or turn on the speech enhancement, with that you can make the middles (voices) bright more.

It almost sounds like you have gotten used to the thin limited sound from TV speakers and expect that is normal. The TV speakers are probably the worst at reproducing what it is supposed to sound like.

Hopefully you’ve tried TruePlay tuning if you have an iOS device. If not read on….

If the Arc Ultra is operating along and you feel there’s too much base in dialogue attaching a sub4 or Sub-Mini may help. Doing so relieves the Arc Ultra of low-end (bass) duties. I know it’s another expense but that’s about all you can do outside of playing with the EQ.

Remember everyone hears audio differently meaning someone else may think the dialogue sounds fine.

I don’t use the TV speakers. However my TV have harman/kardon sound (7.2.4).

What I’m saying is, the Arc Ultra for me (an maybe for you) sounds with like a Harman curve (more bass and treble), so in Sonos you can only adjust Bass and treble so for listen better voices (middles) the only way is to use the speech enhancement (in the Ultra is better because is by AI and you can set the intensity) or lowering the bass a bit.

In theaters (with cinematic sound) the Bass (without LFE) is +10db upset and the rest of frequencies are plain, until a bit +3/4db in some treble. I think you would like the speech enhancement, in the Arc Ultra sounds very good and is the most confortable and better option. Also the Arc Ultra have the center channel more louder and with Trueplay the eq should be plane and then it won’t be cinematic more, until you play a movie.

Okay thanks for the feedback all.

One man’s normal is another man’s artificial. 

​@Martin 908 another thought just occurred to me. Since you haven’t purchased the arc ultra and are listening to demos (at a store?). You are hearing that the store is trying to show off the capability of the arc ultra. Playing movies? ie cinematic content, possibly Dolby Atmos audio. The sound of the arc ultra is going to depend of the content being sent to it. Standard stereo pcm isn’t going to sound like that.

Once you’ve purchased one, if you do, and run TruePlay tuning, which will adjust the sound for your room dynamics, you’ll see that the sound changes based on what you are watching. Based on the type of audio being sent to the soundbar.