Sonos Arc Muddy/Bottoming out Bass

Absolutely okay for movies when you have Samsung Sub, clearly a wide sound image.  Then it had some shortcomings such as 50% sound volume when playing spotify.  The bottom line is that I let my wife choose.  Told the price for the party cost and she always complains about my purchases.  She thought Arc with sub sounded better on both film and music which is important to us.  Samsung was good but set against each other Sonos sub sounds very nice.  The sad thing is that it remains a bit of a base problem for the arc and with the sub it costs like a smaller car!

Yeah, anyone who owns a large(ish) standalone house who thinks ANY soundbar will have sufficient bass without a sub is delusional.

That said, it sounds like there are some issues with the QUALITY of the bass (not quantity) that many are experiencing for whatever reason and that these issues aren’t present on smaller/older Sonos soundbars such as the Beam.  That’s a problem.

That would be like an auto manufacturer releasing a $25,000 vehicle which outperformed their $50,000 model in every aspect.  I can’t imagine that was Sonos’s intent with the release of the Arc, but many people say the Beam currently sounds better.  Again, that’s a problem.

Problem is not the lack of bass, but the muddy and thud type nature of the bass. I am not sure if this can be fixed by DSP given the size of the woofers in the Arc. For deep and clean bass, sub is the way to go. The update did get rid of the wobbling and farting bass to a great extent.

I do not deny that we humans differ in our perception, only what some users complain here is very difficult to understand for a company like Sonos. i'm sure that if the sound engineers understood what muddy bass means, they would solve this problem too. a bass tone or a bass signal cannot be spongy for a soundbar like the arc. its quantization can be inconsistent, which would be fatal, in other words, the bass drum can be heard for milliseconds earlier than the bass. a sound engineer can fix this problem, but no farting bass. a company like sonos can make the mistake instead of class d amplifiers to build in weaker amplifiers so that the boxes with the low frequencies would be overwhelmed, which in our case the arc is not. Then there is the question of definition: what is farting bass, what is dirty bass, how do I defend dull bass? if the beam sounded better to some than the arc, then not because the arc sounded worse, but because the physics of the beam was the right choice for the target group because 11 class d boxes cannot sound worse than 8 class d boxes. So we're talking about different perceptions, different target groups. updates will not fix bass problems in the future, but rather frequency ranges will be shifted and with each shift our perception will also shift. 

(sorry if bad english, i work with the google translator)

Im just hoping and am pretty sure the sound engineers and customer relations are on different pages i can see the appeal for marketing to call the issue fixed and put it out there while the guys in the back room are hopefully fine tuning things. Just hope this info is trickling back to them.

I wouldn’t be too eager with the new testing that’s happening.  There’s no movement on the the muddy bass that is happening.  All that is being routed through the ‘care team’ so expect to be asked the same questions, RMA units over and over.

Sonos update 12.0.5 just been released. Dunno if it sorts out your bass issues or not 🤷‍♂️ 

Just says it’s “Performance enhancement and improved reliability” in the Apple Store 

There also is a firmware update, it’s now build 58180080.

curious to know if we have to do a new Trueplay

I tend to retune after update. Whether you do need to or not, I’m not sure