Enthusiast II

Answered

Sonos Arc Muddy/Bottoming out Bass

1406 replies
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Beyond thrilled to receive the new Sonos Arc. True played my room and I have loudness on as well connected to LG B8 using Tidal and Spotify. Most of the sound range is phenomenal, aside from the bass. At even half volume the woofers are extremely muddy and sound terrible. Not sure if this is because I have under two hours of use but I wasn’t expecting to have to break-in the speaker. I own set of speakers next to it in the same room (KEF LS50W) and the difference is night and day. There have also been posts on Reddit regarding this issue. It is interesting given no reviewers have mentioned this issue but more than a few recipients have. Has anyone else experienced similar issues? Turning loudness off helps but it is disappointing for such a highly anticipated product.

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Scott - SonosAnswer

Sonos Product Management

Hello everyone. I’m a product manager at Sonos. Thank you for sharing your experiences with Arc. The development team is monitoring this community and listening to your feedback.

As we do with all Sonos products, we’ll continue to improve the experience for Arc through numerous software updates into the future. Last week we issued our first update (12.0.1) to fix a bug some customers were experiencing with low-frequency distortion at higher volumes.

If you have specific music tracks or timestamps for TV shows and movies that you want to bring to our attention, please use this form. It is helpful if you can submit a diagnostic when you’re listening to the content. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

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Sash A

Lyricist III

if y'all are so upset and think this is unacceptable, then return it. period. mistakes happen, if you stretched your budget so thin buying a luxury item you probably didn't need to get it anyways. this thing has been out for 5 days. give them some time and they will fix it. check back in a month and buy it again, easy.

If you think its ok that they release a $799+tax product without proper testing then that’s on you. In my opinion they rushed to market trying to capitalize on people sitting at home and said we’ll deal with the fallout later. How can something like this go unnoticed? This isn’t some isolated incident to be called “mistakes happen”. They released untested product. Something that costs the price of two beams should work from day one as intended. Just because the issue doesn’t bother you doesn’t mean that it’s ok for the issue to be there in first place. This is Sonos and this isn’t their first rodeo. Should not have happened, period. The product is used for AUDIO, that should be working flawlessly and not become unusable at over 50% volume. it’s like buying a car that can only go 50mil/hr but hey it’s ok they’ll figure it out later how to make it go faster.

Hi. I think this thread has been really civil so far. There are clearly some who are a little anxious about the situation and I think that’s ok. For some this will have been a really big purchase for themselves and being let down after having chosen to spend their money on this and not something else will result in a more pronounced disappointment. It was my main birthday present this year.

let’s not start posting comments that judge people’s reaction to the issue. If someone goes a little too far, the best thing we can do is ignore it.

If someone judges your comments in a clearly inciting manner then leave it.

otherwise we risk this whole thread getting derailed. It won’t encourage Sonos to support this group.

Please don’t bite

Ok so he posts and judges people’s frustration and says that they didn’t need to get if it’s too expensive but somehow I am judging him? Which part of my response to him isn’t civil? Price isn’t an issue for me personally, but if something costs $799+tax you’d expect to work properly. Which part of that isn’t clear?

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MikeBurrows92

Trending Lyricist I

I might be the only one here but mine is absolutely fine? Is everyone who is having these issues using Arc or eArc? How many units have they sold and are out there working fine? I'm connected to an LG B9 with eArc I'm running without the sub I just have two Play 1s as surrounds I've done the Toy Story 2:58 test and played all of the suggested songs and even cranked the bass up to +10 and I get no distortion or popping like I've heard in this thread. I've watched F1 Drive to Survive on Netflix as it has Atmos and the sound is absolutely incredible the bass is very very good

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Sash A

Lyricist III

I might be the only one here but mine is absolutely fine? Is everyone who is having these issues using Arc or eArc? How many units have they sold and are out there working fine? I'm connected to an LG B9 with eArc I'm running without the sub I just have two Play 1s as surrounds I've done the Toy Story 2:58 test and played all of the suggested songs and even cranked the bass up to +10 and I get no distortion or popping like I've heard in this thread. I've watched F1 Drive to Survive on Netflix as if has Atmos and the sound is absolutely incredible the bass is very very good

I asked the same question about ARC vs eARC and asked asked if people tried a different cable. Have not gotten a clear answer. Have you tried pushing the volume past 50%?

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antm22

Enthusiast I

I might be the only one here but mine is absolutely fine? Is everyone who is having these issues using Arc or eArc? How many units have they sold and are out there working fine? I'm connected to an LG B9 with eArc I'm running without the sub I just have two Play 1s as surrounds I've done the Toy Story 2:58 test and played all of the suggested songs and even cranked the bass up to +10 and I get no distortion or popping like I've heard in this thread. I've watched F1 Drive to Survive on Netflix as if has Atmos and the sound is absolutely incredible the bass is very very good

I asked the same question about ARC vs eARC and asked asked if people tried a different cable. Have not gotten a clear answer. Have you tried pushing the volume past 50%?

If we’re hearing this with music as well, why would ARC/eARC or the cable matter? I’ve tried TV, SiriusXM and Apple Music (both AirPlay and from the Sonos app). I hear terrible bass regardless.

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MikeBurrows92

Trending Lyricist I

I might be the only one here but mine is absolutely fine? Is everyone who is having these issues using Arc or eArc? How many units have they sold and are out there working fine? I'm connected to an LG B9 with eArc I'm running without the sub I just have two Play 1s as surrounds I've done the Toy Story 2:58 test and played all of the suggested songs and even cranked the bass up to +10 and I get no distortion or popping like I've heard in this thread. I've watched F1 Drive to Survive on Netflix as if has Atmos and the sound is absolutely incredible the bass is very very good

I asked the same question about ARC vs eARC and asked asked if people tried a different cable. Have not gotten a clear answer. Have you tried pushing the volume past 50%?

Yeah and it sounded fine, I played a really bass heavy song Don Diablo - The Rhythm

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Sash A

Lyricist III

I might be the only one here but mine is absolutely fine? Is everyone who is having these issues using Arc or eArc? How many units have they sold and are out there working fine? I'm connected to an LG B9 with eArc I'm running without the sub I just have two Play 1s as surrounds I've done the Toy Story 2:58 test and played all of the suggested songs and even cranked the bass up to +10 and I get no distortion or popping like I've heard in this thread. I've watched F1 Drive to Survive on Netflix as if has Atmos and the sound is absolutely incredible the bass is very very good

I asked the same question about ARC vs eARC and asked asked if people tried a different cable. Have not gotten a clear answer. Have you tried pushing the volume past 50%?

If we’re hearing this with music as well, why would ARC/eARC or the cable matter? I’ve tried TV, SiriusXM and Apple Music (both AirPlay and from the Sonos app). I hear terrible bass regardless.

Sorry I did not read the entire thread to see if the issue across all sources. Thank you for clearing that up.

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bbalz

Renowned Enthusiast I

Not incredibly helpful information but I did uninstall Sonos S2 from my Android device and installed a few versions of the S2 beta I had still locally on my phone as I’m part of the beta.

I heard no difference.

The best difference I could do was still just enabling the sub. Even if I had the sub at -15 it sounded night/day better to me.

The moment I disabled the sub and let the Arc + surrounds stand alone, it was a muddy bass sound.

I guess I was hoping to perhaps see a difference with the software with that but I also believe it’s more of the firmware that was updated on the Arc when you set it up out of the box, which I assume everyone had to do the first time they added the Arc to their Sonos system.

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Sash A

Lyricist III

Not incredibly helpful information but I did uninstall Sonos S2 from my Android device and installed a few versions of the S2 beta I had still locally on my phone as I’m part of the beta.

I heard no difference.

The best difference I could do was still just enabling the sub. Even if I had the sub at -15 it sounded night/day better to me.

The moment I disabled the sub and let the Arc + surrounds stand alone, it was a muddy bass sound.

I guess I was hoping to perhaps see a difference with the software with that but I also believe it’s more of the firmware that was updated on the Arc when you set it up out of the box, which I assume everyone had to do the first time they added the Arc to their Sonos system.

Software on the phone would not cause this to happen this is either a firmware issue that’s on the unit itself or drivers not being able to handle the volume and frequencies. Sonos themselves posted that it is a firmware issue and are working on it. Which can also be the reason why reviewers did not experience those issue as they probably did not update the unit right away. Unless they were told not to expose the issue which I am really hoping is not the case here. When they do release the firmware update I just hope it is not just “crutch”. So people should pay attention to how the unit sounded pre update to post update and see if other things have changed.

buzz

Grand Maestro

For the record I”m not having any issues Arc or anything else. That said I have seen a few comments over the weeks regarding bass distortion on ONE’s. These seemed to be individual cases, not a widespread problem.

Likely, the reviewers’ units were produced in a different batch and were using beta software because the final software was released after the reviews were written. (Believe it or not, we are only a week into this) The batch that has been shipped to the public was probably fresh off the boat. Further, since some units don’t exhibit the issue, it could be tied to a particular production line, possibly corrupt software on a line. There are layers to the software in this sort of product. Not all layers are routinely updated in the field. If a fundamental layer is corrupt from the assembly line, a routine update will not fix this. In some respects it is like socks. It’s easy to put socks on while sitting at home, much harder to change socks while running. It is possible that the problem units will need a custom update.

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tdifonzo

Contributor II

My Arc was delivered today, and after a couple hours of testing I’m convinced that it is some sort of crossover software issue. It sounds great when the Sub is active but when it is not active it sounds like it’s trying to push the low Sub frequencies to the Arc and it just doesn’t have big enough drivers for that. Not sure the exact Hz but it needs to be lifted. Also put my surrounds on full music audio and turned them all the way up and I could hear the same rumbly attempt at bass with the Sub off. My Play 5 Gen 2 which is also on S2 seems unaffected.

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