Sonos Arc - Metallic Sound

I recently purchased two Arc soundbars. Bought the second one because I changed my mind on the color option. I gave both a go and found the same issue with both bars…that is the dialogue is incredibly forward and shrill to my ears. I find the dialogue is so loud and so forward that it makes it very difficult to enjoy the speaker, in fact it’s even causing ear fatigue and pain ¼ way through a movie. 

I’m coming from a PlayBar paired to a Sub Mini and 2 Play Ones as rears. So that is my baseline of comparison as well as a more decked out system in our living room that is a 5.1.2 Atmos Receiver setup. 

I want to raise the volume up to a decent level but I find when I do the dialogue is just so present and ear piercingly loud and shrill. It was exhausting to my ears after as little as 20 min. I tried making adjustments the next day. I turned off the dialogue enhancement. Turned down the Treble. I still was feeling like my ears where hurting as I was still feeling a lingering ear pressure / discomfort from the prior days run of less than 30 min listening to action sequence at the end of Rogue One. 

The pain kicked in again and I had to take Ibuprofen and a Prednisone to get my ears to settle down. (I have prednisone for my ears for flying. I have a history of ear pain from the pressure while flying that is well mitigated by taking 5 mg of prednisone an hour or two before landings).
 

So maybe my ears are somehow more sensitive to the highs of the dialogue…who knows. I do know that I can crank the same system with the PlayBar in place with Zero issues and no ear fatigue or pain. I know that I can crank my Atmos setup in the living room very loud and have Zero ear pain or ear fatigue. 5 speakers in the living room setup are Martin Logan speakers and there’s an SVS Sub as well. 
 

The only other time I’ve had ear fatigue is when I had ELAC speakers as my front stage. They are not very sensitive speakers and so you have to really drive them with quite a bit of power to get them to sing and sound great. I would get fatigued after about an hour of quite loud music listening with the ELAC speakers.

I don’t feel like I’m pushing the Arc soundbar unreasonably high or anything and yet I’m having this really unpleasant ear pain and fatigue with the dialogue and highs.
 

I’m going to give it one more shot now that my ears have rested for 4 days. Going to try the Arc again starting with the Treble turned down, with the dialogue enhancement turned off. I want to see if the arc can still sound any good with these restrained settings while also hopefully not causing me ear fatigue or pain.

I really want this to work but it sucks this is an issue when the PlayBar setup is quite good and has a rich warm tone to the music and has great rich bass that the Arc just lacks in. 
 

Has anyone found any solution to this problem with their Arc? 

Just bought the Arc + Sub3, after having a demo in RicherSounds in the UK. I thought it sounded metallic in the store but the sales guy said it was due to the height of the demo room.

After finishing setup in my 4m x 4m x 2.3m living room, with carpet and other soft furnishings, the sounds is… metallic and shrill. Movies I know well sound odd. There seems to be a clear gap in the midrange. Voices have no timbre. As and Ts sound harsh. TrueSound doesn’t help at all.

This is running 14.20.1; I was hoping I’d be running and old SW version and upgrade would fix this, but no.

It seems to be worst with 7.1TrueHD audio. And the volume is all over the place; action sounds can fill out the midrange, but they become super loud, so need to be turned down. Moments later, during conversation, I’m reaching for the remote to turn up the speaker so I can hear what they’re saying. I really don’t want to be surfing the remote with everything I watch.

Switching to 5.1 seems to help a little, but not enough to be a good “fix”. Turning off the sub doesn’t help much either.

At the weekend I’m going to grab a Beam for a comparison, but I’m 90% sure this £1600 speaker combo will be returned next week. I did my research and all the reviews said Sonos was a clear winner in the tests, but honestly my Bose SoundLink Mini seems to provide better midrange over Bluetooth than this “market leader”.

If anyone has a fix for this I’m sure the community would love to hear it. And I’d love to hear what people moved to if they’re happy after returning their Arc.

Did you compare with the Beam? Same problem?

Yep. The Beam sounded so much worse in my space that I boxed it back up and returned it within the hour.

I’ve kept the Arc. After doing more research, I made a few changes:

1. I found that if I used my older 12” iPad (before the newer apple processors) for the Trueplay tuning I had much better results.
2. My room is arranged with the TV on the wall and Arc directly beneath that on a shelf, with a sofa mid-way through the room facing it, then a dining table behind that, between the sofa and the far wall. When I ran the Trueplay I made sure that I didn’t walk further than than the back of the sofa, about half-way in the room. That helped a lot, especially since we generally watch TV on the sofa and not while dining.
3. I’ve since added 2 Ikea Symfonisk picture frames to the “back” wall behind the dining table, and it has made quite a difference. Can definitely recommend if your budget accommodates it. In store I tested the frame against the lamp and bookshelf speaker, and it was by far the best sounding. The lamp was ok, but the bookshelf speaker sounded cheap and boxy – definitely one to avoid.
4. Finally, I tweaked the EQ: Bass +1, Treble -1, Loudness ON. For Surround Audio I changed: TV Level +2, to account for the distance from the Symfonisks to the back of the sofa.

I’m pretty happy with the setup now: Arc + Sub(G3) + 2x Symfonisk Frames. There’s much less high-pitched annoyances from dialogue, deeper voices have some of their timbre back.

Unfortunately I’m still having to “ride the remote” for certain TV shows & most movies, maybe a little more than I did with my Bose system, but the improved 5.1 and 7.1 sound makes up for it.

It would be great if I could normalise the loudness a little more. Watching action movies/programmes (eg. Marvel), the volume can jump a lot in a very short space of time between quiet dialog and loud music/effects. I’m a little concerned for neighbours. Maybe Volume Limit would help in this case? I’ve reduced it a little but haven’t noticed an impact yet. Need to test it more.

Totally agree, sound clarity is great but also quite harsh.

Guys did u notice difference in Arcs sound profile after release 15.4.? Not causing  severe discomfort  to ears now despite sound is still kind of strong and not so warm....ssshhhh sound effect is also significantly reduced..   Sonos started it's attempt in the right direction from 14.12 with clarity upgrade to Arc...Sonos pls continue ur attempts in providing warm sound....don't stop...not 100% yet.

My 135 inch screen projector screen has an Arc and I own over 30 Sonos speakers, 7 TVs, all of which have a beam. I think it is the worst speaker that Sonos has ever made. There will be no doubt at all that the beam sounds way better in just about everything you throw at it, regardless of the cost. This thread as been very helpful to me as I thought I was losing my mind. I have tried mounting it over and under the screen, as well as tuning it using the iPad but nothing works, the ARC sounds like a cheap speaker and is not well suited to dealing with voices from any source. Please Sonos, make some changes to this product or admit that you have a shaky product and let us know about it. It should be noted that I have owned it for sufficient time for it to bed in or whatever it needed to do over the past year and I have noticed no improvement in my hearing over the past year

Really? - I have the Arc and two Beams - I find the Arc sounds way better than the Beam for every type of playing audio and It most certainly outshines the Beam when playing Dolby Atmos surround sound (either compressed DD+ or uncompressed DD TrueHD) - maybe it’s your connected Projector that is at the heart of the issue here🤔?

I have Era-300’s and Sub x2 attached to the Arc - what’s not to like about that particular setup?

I got an arc recently I was not impressed with the high frequency, first thing I noticed out the box was how toppy and bright it was, listening to female newsreaders who are kind of whistling as they say any words with the letter “s” in it. I boxed it all up for a while and got it out again yesterday and upgraded the software so it’s now on 15.5 but still far too bright. I compared a music track between my  2 x Era 100’s and the Arc, the Era’s are not bright at all, but the Arc was much too toppy, like the treble is at maximum all the time.

I’ve turned the treble down to -3 but it’s not really improved.

I got it from John Lewis and as it’s been opened can’t really take it back very easily. Wish I got it from Sonos direct now.