I have the new Sonos Amp with Oberon 5 speakers as a replacement for my PlayBar. I am disappointed by 1. the implementation of the phantom center channel on this, 2. the DSP settings available for the surround speakers and 3. overall brightness, especially when adding the Sub. Although the Amp is an improvement for Music alone, the Playbar is better for Movies (together with Trueplay, Sub and Surrounds). It seems like a half finished product to me and hopefully they will make improvements over time.

1. Phantom center:

I already noticed that voices are very low in volume compared to movie sound effects on my Playbar, but this is even more noticeable on the AMP. Due to complaints Sonos has partly solved this in the past by adding a button which artificially increases the “voice frequencies”. This option is far from ideal as it does not cover all voices (especially low ones) and it also brightens the rest of sound image. A much better option would be in my opinion if Sonos let you choose the dB level of the center channel (opposed to the other channels) in the processing of the 5.1 input. Don’t know why they did not do that, because this would be the far better option.

2. DSP settings surround speakers:

Secondly, which is also very annoying is that there are no DSP settings for the surround speakers (in my case Sonos One). Normally TruePlay will reduce the bass frequencies in my set up because the Sonos One speakers are placed near a corner. However, both trueplay and manual EQ settings are not available when using the Sonos Amp. This means that you have to reduce the overall volume in my case of the surround speakers, which reduces the 5.1 effects, but I only want to reduce the bass, not the overall volume. Again is normally done by Trueplay, but this is not available with third party speakers.

3. Brightness with Sub (and in general)

For some reason the Sonos Amp is very bright out of the box. There are already a lot of topics on this, but somehow it is really bright/harsch and I have to put my treble way down in the menu (but OK at least you can adjust this). However which is really strange is when you decide to add the Sonos Sub to the Amp, there is even an additional very noticeable jump in brightness. I looks like Sonos does the same processing here, as is done as with the Playbar in that the higher frenquencies are sent to the speakers and the lower to the Sub. However, I already have big speakers, so I don’t want this. I chose for big speakers in set up menu, but this does not seem to have an effect at all. This just seems to be a fault in their software.

Story short the Sonos Amp is an OK product for stereo set up, but with respect to the 5.1 integration (even with their on products) it seems unfinished and lacks the finess I got used to from Sonos products. It appears they did not test it in normal use cases or just did’t want of bother with customers using this for integration in their 5.1 setup.