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New Beam. Low sound on stereo channels compared to 5.1!

  • 9 September 2018
  • 6 replies
  • 1411 views
H
Hi all

After much deliberation, today I bought a Beam to go with my pair of Play 1s. I have to say that I am very impressed and it is a big improvement on my old sound bar. But... there is an issue that is bugging me. Audio is much quieter on channels that provide a stereo signal compared to those that provide 5.1. I have read that other people have experienced this, mainly with Samsung TVs I think but I have not found a post giving a solution. I am using a Sony Bravia and have tried different audio settings on that but there aren’t that many options. The source of content is from a TiVo box. Can anyone shed any light on a solution to this? Ideally I do not want to go optical. Thanks.
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Best answer by Airgetlam 10 September 2018, 23:46

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6 replies

Airgetlam
I'm afraid that you're dealing with the difference in mastering the signal, rather than interpreting the signal. It's more apparent when you start listening to a true Dolby Digital signal, whereas the TV does a fair job of masking that difference when you're listening to just stereo from their speakers.

I have similar issues between watching movies and watching sports. The engineers who set up the sound "space" have varying opinions on how much LFE and surrounds to use, and it's different often from one station to the next that I'm watching football on.
Bruce
H
Thanks for the reply Bruce. That makes sense although surely volumes across different signals could be normalised so they are the same instead of having to change volume manually depending on channel? I never noticed this before on my previous soundbar using an optical connection. Would this situation be different using optical? Of course it may be that I am over analysing everything coming out of the beam and my last bar had the same issues.
Airgetlam
In all honestly, I've only ever had Sonos playbars. I dabbled in broadcast engineering many, many years ago, so am more familiar with it from the origination side, rather than the consumption side. But yes, I suppose if Sonos were to desire to insert them more into the process, they could normalize the signal, since they're already allowing a certain amount of balance/treble/bass....but those may not be interpreted inside the stream, but instead how the actual speaker interprets the signal. The way Sonos works, as far as I know, tends to be relatively "hands off" on the stream, in order to keep latency as low as possible. The only processing that I'm aware of that they do to the stream is to interpret the dolby digital signal, and spread it out to the necessary speakers.

But they certainly don't do any normalization on music streams, since the Sonos app really isn't "in the middle", it's just a controller app, and all the hard work is done at the speaker level. The sound never actually goes through "the app" at all, so there's not much normalization that can be done.

As to overanalyzing, who knows. I'm certainly not willing to say that you are. What you hear / perceive is as much reality as what I do. I was just positing some potential answers. I'm not a sound engineer, nor do I play one on TV (that's a reference to a US commercial, and meant as a joke). Nor do I work for Sonos. Just trying to provide some potential answers based on my own experience. Worth every penny...or pence, that you paid for it. 🙂
Bruce
H
Thanks again Bruce. Worth every penny! Definitely potential credible answers that I’m happy to go with. I was just curious to see who else might have had this issue but importantly, it is not spoiling my experience.
Airgetlam
Again, you're most welcome. I found this thread to be interesting as well, and may help give you more information :)

https://en.community.sonos.com/setting-up-sonos-228990/sky-hd-box-low-volume-6812511
Bruce
S
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Yeah, it's annoying how with Dolby content you can set the volume to "16" but with DTS and thus PCM you have to set it to "50" to get the same volume. If only they included DTS codecs - the world would be golden.
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