CONCLUSION (AT LONG LAST)

Am I happy? Yes, yes I am. The completed system sounds exceptional. It’s easy to use. It’s significantly fewer wires and cables. The surrounds and Sub can be moved around so much more easily since they’re wireless. The Sonos app, while a little clunky in my opinion, is easy enough to use and gives you nice functionality at your fingertips. And AirPlay…. oh, man, AirPlay. I love being able to just throw some music to it from my iPhone, iPad, or even from another HomePod via Siri, without having to turn on the TV. I’ve been really surprised at how well the Arc plays with the rest of my HomePods and how much I’ve enjoyed listening to music on it that way. 

Could I have put together a more capable receiver + speaker AV system for less. Oh, most definitely. But simplicity is meaning more and more to me the older I get. Do I love geeking out and messing around with all the tech? Without a doubt. But sometimes (most times), you just want to fire up a movie and get lost in it for a while. Without having to futz around with receiver settings. 

Do i recommend it? If you can afford the whole thing - yes. If you can only swing the Arc… that’s a bigger question that i don’t think can be answered until the bass issue fix is out and people can properly evaluate it. 

But for now, I’m going to enjoy the hell out of my Arc system. 

Thanks for following along. ;-) 

Thanks for the observations and enjoy! My Arc Arrived today which replaces my Beam and is paired with a Gen 2 Sub and Play:1’s as surrounds and I’m generally happy with it so will likely sell the Beam. Agree the Sub makes a big difference, but coming from the Beam I can tell you for sure that the impact is even greater with the Beam. That thing just requires the Sub. I use Trueplay as it works great for home theater content.  For music though the Arc (and Beam suffered from this to a lesser degree too) sounds a bit too bright with Trueplay to me. I leave the surrounds on ambient usually as they are close by right behind my couch.

Bigger issue for me is can’t really get much Atmos content. I watched Blade Runner 2049 on Vudu (which seems to be the only built in app that works with Atmos for me on my P75-F1) and it sounded absolutely fantastic. Overhead sounds are subtle in parts and more obvious in others but I did feel more height with Atmos. The rears do a lot of the lifting to sometimes make me think it’s coming from overhead possibly but the overall sound was very engaging and dynamic.
 

I can’t however get any Atmos from an Apple TV 4K. Going back to built in apps, Prime Video is supposed to work with Atmos but won’t for me. Netflix also only does DD+. Disappointing because both the Prime Video and Netflix support pages say their Vizio apps support Atmos. Hopefully that gets addressed by whosever is responsible since the hardware is clearly capable given Vudu.
 

Wouldn’t mind trying the 5.1.2 test tones you mention. Can you share the link and let us know how you played it on your system?

Absolutely! Here’s the direct download link: 

https://www.heimkino-atmos.de/.cm4all/uproc.php/0/Trailer/Dolby%20Atmos/dolby-test-tones_5_1_2.mp4?_=15dddc34420&cdp=a

And here’s the link to the Reddit post with some additional commentary: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/hc21uu/dolby_atmos_512_test_video_file_download_link/

To play it, I loaded it onto my Plex server (I’ve got a library just for “demos” like this, including THX, DTS, and Dolby trailers and demos), and played it on my Vizio E70-F3’s built-in Plex app since the Apple TV can’t pass Atmos through this TV. It worked perfectly since it was encoded in “streaming” E-AC3 that works over the Vizio’s HDMI-ARC connection (as opposed to being encoded in Dolby True HD which won't work over HDMI-ARC (the non e-ARC version) due to lack of bandwidth). 

(Side mini-rant: obviously Dolby didn’t anticipate the situation that Sonos Arc owners find ourselves in, but it sure would be nice if TrueHD could fail-down gracefully from lossless TrueHD with Atmos to lossy E-AC3 while retaining Atmos for lower bandwidth situations. I’m sure there are many wonderful reasons why it can’t - maybe would require a hardware encoder at the sending device? - but it sure would be nice)

(Ugh - I wrote up a whole thing but for some reason it got flagged for moderation. I don’t know why the Sonos forum doesn’t like me. Regardless, here’s the links)

Absolutely @starlan! Here’s the direct download link: 

https://www.heimkino-atmos.de/.cm4all/uproc.php/0/Trailer/Dolby%20Atmos/dolby-test-tones_5_1_2.mp4?_=15dddc34420&cdp=a

And here’s the link to the Reddit post with some additional commentary: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/hc21uu/dolby_atmos_512_test_video_file_download_link/

Thanks for the response! I will give this a shot through Plex as well.

Good luck to you! Let us know what you think!