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Lpcm sound is considerably quieter than Dolby Digital plus 5.1 or other modes, annoying
Is that normal or not?
Or maybe work in progress?
Is lpcm the best option for my setup , gaming on ps5?
Thanks everyone for helping in advance
Peace
Dawid
Best answer by Rowena B.
View original
+18
Hi All.
Sonos currently only supports 5.1 multichannel LCPM, though we are currently working on supporting 7.1 - by downmixing to 5.1, not full 7.1 reproduction. So right now, 7.1 LPCM is not supported and your sources should be set to 5.1 LPCM, where possible, or Dolby Digital 5.1 (or DD+ for Atmos).
In time (I have no details to share as to when), 7.1 LPCM will be downmixed to 5.1.0 on the Arc.
Differing content can often be mastered to different volume levels, and when a change in encoding is involved, this is even more likely as the sound track will be adjusted to best fit the parameters and abilities of the codec. Technically, however, LPCM isn’t a codec (it’s uncompressed) and is in fact how all digital equipment handles sound internally - at some point, regardless of any formats/codecs/channels being used, everything is converted to LPCM before being passed to the digital amplifiers inside all Sonos speakers/Amps. Included in the decoding process of Dolby Digital and Atmos to LPCM is a volume boost/range compression. As LPCM isn’t processed (decompressed) like a codec, there isn’t the same opportunity for this to happen. When LPCM is played, you get the closest to the original track possible - the data on the source is relayed directly to the amplifier after mixing.
Therefore, varying volume levels are normal, or they may be an artifact of 7.1 currently being mishandled.
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Hi
I’m sorry - I don’t understand. Fidelity has nothing to do with volume, and we were discussing volume.
As mentioned above, I have already flagged this volume issue for internal investigation. If the comparative volume of LPCM vs Atmos is the problem you’re experiencing, I’ve already done all I can to help.
I can confirm that even if you change the PS5 settings to AV receiver and force it to 5.1 multichannel the low volume of LPCM is still there. The sounds are coming out of the right speakers. Just low volume. Change the PS5 setting to Dolby and there is a noticeable difference in volume.
Not sure what the solution is here.
I can confirm, LPCM does indeed come through softer, both through the arc, and any associated surrounds.
It can be easily reproduced if you output audio to the 6th and 7th channels, respectively. This can be done via a traditional source (Blu-ray player, NVIDIA Shield, etc.), or via a program like REW (Room EQ Wizard).
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So for now, should i set my ps5 to bitstream (dolby) with 5.1 for gaming? I have a lgc9 set up with my arc and 2 play one’s plus a sub. My tv is would then be set to bitstream and pasthrough for the audio settings.
This mostly makes sense - except that it doesn’t explain why if you are starting with a 5.1 source it would still sound quiet, as then no conversion from 7.1 to 5.1 is even happening. I can experiment with a few sources. And while I would grant there is variability across sources, I think the low volume problem is pretty consistent across the board, hence this thread.
Same here. Since day 1 after the LPCM update. LPCM audio is way lower than Dolby digital 5.1 or Atmos. I'm sure it's a bug , many people have the same issue. Just to let you know I'm using Sony A9G tv on ps5 and Xbox series X . Sonos team need to look into this.
Same here with a Sonos Beam soundbar, using optical out from TV (Samsung KS8000). LPCM is much softer than Bitstream (Dolby).
For now I've just set the PS5 to audio format priority to Dolby but Sonos needs to fix LPCM. Doesn't make sense that it's quieter.
+1
Sonos please fix it
+1
Hi All.
Sonos currently only supports 5.1 multichannel LCPM, though we are currently working on supporting 7.1 - by downmixing to 5.1, not full 7.1 reproduction. So right now, 7.1 LPCM is not supported and your sources should be set to 5.1 LPCM, where possible, or Dolby Digital 5.1 (or DD+ for Atmos).
In time (I have no details to share as to when), 7.1 LPCM will be downmixed to 5.1.0 on the Arc.
Differing content can often be mastered to different volume levels, and when a change in encoding is involved, this is even more likely as the sound track will be adjusted to best fit the parameters and abilities of the codec. Technically, however, LPCM isn’t a codec (it’s uncompressed) and is in fact how all digital equipment handles sound internally - at some point, regardless of any formats/codecs/channels being used, everything is converted to LPCM before being passed to the digital amplifiers inside all Sonos speakers/Amps. Included in the decoding process of Dolby Digital and Atmos to LPCM is a volume boost/range compression. As LPCM isn’t processed (decompressed) like a codec, there isn’t the same opportunity for this to happen. When LPCM is played, you get the closest to the original track possible - the data on the source is relayed directly to the amplifier after mixing.
Therefore, varying volume levels are normal, or they may be an artifact of 7.1 currently being mishandled.
This mostly makes sense - except that it doesn’t explain why if you are starting with a 5.1 source it would still sound quiet, as then no conversion from 7.1 to 5.1 is even happening. I can experiment with a few sources. And while I would grant there is variability across sources, I think the low volume problem is pretty consistent across the board, hence this thread.
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Hi
What are you basing your statement that LPCM will be quieter than Dolby Digital off of? If anything, LPCM is more likely to have greater depth/fullness/loudness, as it is a lossless format (Dolby Digital is lossy).
As I stated:
Differing content can often be mastered to different volume levels, and when a change in encoding is involved, this is even more likely as the sound track will be adjusted to best fit the parameters and abilities of the codec. Technically, however, LPCM isn’t a codec (it’s uncompressed) and is in fact how all digital equipment handles sound internally - at some point, regardless of any formats/codecs/channels being used, everything is converted to LPCM before being passed to the digital amplifiers inside all Sonos speakers/Amps. Included in the decoding process of Dolby Digital and Atmos to LPCM is a volume boost/range compression. As LPCM isn’t processed (decompressed) like a codec, there isn’t the same opportunity for this to happen. When LPCM is played, you get the closest to the original track possible - the data on the source is relayed directly to the amplifier after mixing.
You are correct - LPCM from the source will have greater depth (dynamic range), which is exactly why it sounds quieter - there’s less compression. This has nothing to do with algorithmic data compression, but auditory dynamic range compression instead. With less compression there is a greater range in volume level between something quiet and something loud. A cinema would not dream of compressing this range, but watching movies at home is a different matter. When there is no compression, you’ll need to turn up the volume to hear quiet vocals, and then explosions are really loud - something a cinema desires, rather than tries to avoid.
I did say “in general”. There’s no technicality that says LPCM is quieter compared to other formats - I’m just saying that it’s something you’re likely to perceive, as opposed to the opposite.
Let me start by saying, I was always in the camp of "sonos is doing something goofy with lpcm. But after I have messed around with different sources and titles, a lot of the issue comes down to how the movie was filmed (mainly what era) and what service is pumping it out. I think something could be down with a boost option for some poorly recorded movies and junk service providers, but ultimately I think a lot of the blame falls on the studios and the streaming providers.
As of today the ps5 supports native Dolby atmos
i just tested it with the Arc, it works great and it's about 3 times louder than lpcm so if you have a ps5 make sure to use Atmos not lpcm anymore
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Hi
The topic of this thread was never going to be “fixed” because nothing is broken. LCPM is expected to be quieter than some other formats.
When DD+ is decompressed, we use that opportunity to boost the volume of the output. LPCM cannot be decompressed because it isn’t a compressed format - it’s passed straight to the amplifier without being altered. In a sense, it remains “faithful” to the original audio track.
Besides, even when using the same format, each movie is levelled differently because it’s a different engineer doing the audio mix. Then another engineer - one who hasn’t necessarily ever spoken to the director of the movie - comes along and remixes the compressed audio formats from the master track for the home market.
I usually find myself adjusting the volume for nearly ever piece of content I watch - especially when it comes to movies, but also each YouTube video or TV program.
I hope this helps.
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Just adding a “me too” to the thread.
This is the same for me on Xbox Series X, that is - LPCM 5.1 uncompressed is noticeably quieter (and seems less dynamic/wide?) than converting to Bitstream Dolby Digital 5.1. Either way, at least multichannel (5.1) signal is being passed, but it is strange.
Did Sonos ever acknowledge the muffledvolume for multi-channel PCM following the December 2020 update?
Hi
Your Arc will basically be playing what it is told to play - if LPCM sounds different to other formats (soft and muddy), it’s because your Apple TV (or TV) is delivering it that way. Different hardware is decoding whatever came before LPCM (it’s unlikely that the source media contained a LPCM track), and that must be the reason for things sounding differently.
If volume is the only difference, however, I can only suggest altering the volume with the controls.
I hope this helps.
This thread is 2 years old and people are having issues with their ARC and many different devices while playing LPCM.
It can’t be the Apple TV because other sound bars down sound low/muddy when paying LPCM.
Very frustrating as we’re 2 years into a thread with various people saying the same thing and nothing being done about it.
If you are using Apple TV, like I said earlier, go to Paramount+ and play Arrival. Go to the 30 minute mark amd listen for five minutes or so. You will be getting 5.1 PCM (you can't get LPCM through streaming). It's rocking well on my system as far as punch and volume. Granted, this is one of the few examples I can find of this, which points back to provider and the studios recording.
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Hi
If apps on your PS5 are a lot quieter than your TV apps, perhaps you should be asking Sony for a fix?
The Arc is not going to think “he’s playing it from a PS5, I think I’ll be quieter than usual”. It plays the feed it’s given. As it plays the feed from the TV apps without issue, it’s working correctly.
If the PS5 is not responsible for the lowered volume, then your TV is.
I truly do understand the frustration you’re probably feeling, but in this case there is nothing that we can do. I recommend you stick to the TV’s apps, if the PS5 doesn’t have a setting that will fix the issue.
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Hi
Welcome to the Sonos community and thanks for reaching out to us. Let me share some information to help you out.
LCPM is an uncompressed audio format that provides high-quality audio to our eARC supported home theater devices. It supports up to 8 channels (5.1 and 7.1 surrounds are the most common). Getting audio depends on the physical source device playing the content and the format or output must be set to one of our supported home theater audio formats. Some players and game consoles use DTS audio format which is not supported by Sonos. Some have the ability to transcode DTS into a format that Sonos supports, such as Dolby Digital 5.1. You may also check this article about unsupported audio on home theater speakers for reference.
To take a look at your Sonos system, it would be great if you can submit a diagnostic and include the confirmation number in your response. I'd appreciate it too if you can provide us the make and model of your TV so that we can look up the information.
If you need help with any other information, please be sure to let us know. We’ll wait for your reply.
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Hi
I confess I didn’t really think of music BluRays - thanks for setting me straight!
I’ll see if I can get someone with an Arc to give that file a listen - thank you for the effort you obviously put in to do that.
Hi
I confess I didn’t really think of music BluRays - thanks for setting me straight!
I’ll see if I can get someone with an Arc to give that file a listen - thank you for the effort you obviously put in to do that.
Hi Corry,
No problem! Needless to say you need to play this on a device that does bitstream Passthrough and not for instance a Apple TV 4K that converts everything to LPCM by default to hear the difference between the tracks.
+18
Hi
This thread is 2 years old and people are having issues with their ARC and many different devices while playing LPCM.
It can’t be the Apple TV because other sound bars down sound low/muddy when paying LPCM.
Very frustrating as we’re 2 years into a thread with various people saying the same thing and nothing being done about it.
Well, I suppose it depends upon what you mean by “low/muddy”. If someone calls in saying their Sonos Arc sounds quieter when playing LPCM, the understandable response will likely be to turn up the volume - movies are mixed at differing volumes. We’re not going to record this as a report of a bug, because it isn’t one. With compressed formats, we need to decompress them prior to playback and I have been told that as a part of that process we increase the gain - something that doesn’t happen with LPCM as it does not need decoding (I think I mentioned this earlier in this thread). This, however, only addresses LPCM often being quieter than other formats, and not it being “muddy”, so I again encourage you to get in touch if “muddy” doesn’t just mean quiet - in fact, I wouldn’t even mention the volume except as a side-note. “Degraded audio quality” would be the phrase I would use.
Also, as mentioned previously by myself and others, LPCM generally isn’t something you’ll find - no streaming service will supply it, and I would have to see visual proof of it being on a Blu-Ray before I was inclined to believe any such report, so we necessarily come to the fact that any LPCM stream you see reported in the Sonos app has come from either a) the live audio of a games console outputting LPCM specifically while playing a game or b) the result of a device further up the media playback chain decoding the actually-supplied, compressed audio stream in whatever format into LPCM before the Arc ever receives it, in which case it’s not really for us to do anything about it - anything we do do will adversely affect people who don’t have the same equipment as you.
I can’t comment on soundbars from other manufacturers, but if you’ve done a side-by-side comparison with LPCM and other formats and found Arc to definitely be inferior with LPCM specifically, then I would ask that you contact our technical support team and tell them as much, as I’m sure our engineers would like to see/hear some video proof and diagnostics. If you are going by what other people report, remember that you are on the internet and things should be taken with a few grains of salt - but that just means that it’s them that should be getting in touch rather than you. If true, we’d love to know.
Personally, I watch a fair bit of content, and I find myself adjusting the volume for nearly every piece - with YouTube videos, I’ll be at anything from 10 to 16 volume (I put this down to the inexperience that YouTubers have with audio engineering, as compared to professionals working in a TV studio, for example). With TV programs (mostly Dolby Digital or AAC stereo), 12 is common. With movies, however, it can vary from 12 to 30. I usually only need to go as high as 30 if the source format is Dolby TrueHD, but it is not in any way every TrueHD movie that needs to be that high - just the occasional, random one. 18 is more common, but then I often want movies to be a bit louder anyway. Full disclosure - I have an Amp, which does not support LPCM or Atmos, and my nVidia Shield transcodes unsupported formats on-the-fly (but without altering the volume).
I hope this helps.
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Hi
I understand your point, but the issue may be due to the TV not being physically able to passthrough LPCM and so it encodes it to Dolby Digital (which may include volume adjustment or dynamic compression at either the compression or decompression stages), or it could just be due to a setting on the TV. Without any details (or diagnostics) it’s impossible to determine. In most cases we recommend getting in touch with our technical support team first, so we can confirm the issue or fix it, but if an Arc works with one source correctly then it works as it should and any other issues must be induced either at the source or the TV, assuming all codecs remain the same.
However, it’s generally customer contact volumes that drive a company to implement changes. Regardless of the level of skill/knowledge of a support agent, the details of the issue are recorded for data analysis and trends are flagged, so just getting in touch and explaining the issue should be enough for this to work. If Sony (just for example) came to us and reported a compatibility issue with a combination of our and their products, but not a single customer of ours had reported any such thing, I can’t see us considering it a priority. If it was a TV model yet to be released, then I’m sure we’d work together prior to the product launch, however.
Having said that, I will see what I can do to raise this issue internally for investigation.
Hi
I understand your point, but the issue may be due to the TV not being physically able to passthrough LPCM and so it encodes it to Dolby Digital (which may include volume adjustment or dynamic compression at either the compression or decompression stages), or it could just be due to a setting on the TV. Without any details (or diagnostics) it’s impossible to determine. In most cases we recommend getting in touch with our technical support team first, so we can confirm the issue or fix it, but if an Arc works with one source correctly then it works as it should and any other issues must be induced either at the source or the TV, assuming all codecs remain the same.
However, it’s generally customer contact volumes that drive a company to implement changes. Regardless of the level of skill/knowledge of a support agent, the details of the issue are recorded for data analysis and trends are flagged, so just getting in touch and explaining the issue should be enough for this to work. If Sony (just for example) came to us and reported a compatibility issue with a combination of our and their products, but not a single customer of ours had reported any such thing, I can’t see us considering it a priority. If it was a TV model yet to be released, then I’m sure we’d work together prior to the product launch, however.
Having said that, I will see what I can do to raise this issue internally for investigation.
Thanks, Also the other recent thread I posted similar about the LPCM 7.1 output issue on LG oleds, where all 5.1 audio is output as multichannel pcm 7.1, when the devices are connected direct to an LG oled and passthrough is set on the LG
Such as Xbox series x set to uncompressed 5.1 outputs as multichannel pcm 7.1
or
Apple 4k tv all DD 5.1 audio is output as multichannel pcm 7.1
Clearly an issue LGs side it seems, but I have got nowhere with them to get the issue raised and fixed, many others have same problem. Perhaps Sonos could nudge LG to investigate.
Hi
You are very welcome!
Like my colleague, I have a nVidia Shield Pro, and when I play a file with DTS-HD, Plex will automatically extract (not transcode) the DTS core from that and pass it along to my TV/Amp. This would also work with an Arc, and while DTS isn’t DTS-HD, it’s a lot better than Dolby Digital. The Shield has several output format options (but will only transcode to Dolby Digital) - it might be worth a look. Mind you, Plex may behave the same way on Apple TV - I don’t know. I do know another program similar to Plex called Emby does not extract the DTS core, so perhaps it depends on the software you are using rather than the Apple TV itself?
After reading your earlier post, I had assumed you were using the Zidoo - have you tried it?
Currently I am using Apple TV 4K + Infuse. Which converts everything to LPCM which should be identical to the original source. I really would like the best possible quality I can get and this solution should in theory be a “one-that-does-it-all” solution. I used the Zidoo because I also want the best Atmos experience with Dolby TrueHD + Atmos, which the Apple TV 4K cannot do. (So much for that one-that-does-it-all solution right lol). I have also tried the Nvidea Shield but did not really like it. I am more of a Apple eco-system guy. Thanks for your input, and maybe I have to reevaluate my setup in the near future ;)
Not sure Sonos has a lot of clout with LG, to be honest. Sonos doesn’t purchase their TVs in large numbers, nor is there any revenue sharing between the two companies. As he suggested, it’s likely that individual voices such as yours carry as much, if not more weight, since you’re a paying customer, and a voice that may affect other purchasers.
That being said, I suspect Sonos does pass on some level of data to them. How much it is valued is anyone’s guess.
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