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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S

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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M

MerlinNL

Lyricist III

Don’t think you need eArc for Atmos. Currently most services offering Atmos will work with normal HDMI Arc. I think eArc might be needed for some Blu-ray movies though, and in the future it might become more widely used. But by then you’ll have a new TV anyway!

You need eARC for proper, lossless dolby atmos. Through regular ARC, you can get compressed Atmos, wrapped as dolby digital plus. This is what many streaming services support but it's lossy and not a patch on the sound you get from dolby atmos/truehd from a 4k bluray.

Exactly. Dolby Atmos is nothing more than some sort of metadata. The audio can either be wrapped in Dolby TrueHD or in Dolby Digital Plus. TrueHD is the BluRay format (and also applicable for br-rips). DD+ is what streaming services use, as you mentioned before. Dolby states: ‘TrueHD is able to deliver audiophile quality equivalent to uncompressed PCM without impacting HD picture quality or limiting the value-added extras that content providers may wish to include on the disc.’

(e)ARC is the abbreviation of (extended) Audio Return Channel. Don’t make the wrong assumption that this is an input port on your Sonos, it’s actually an input port on your TV with a specific band through which audio is returned to your audio device, in this case your Arc.

eARC has more bandwidth in order to be able to stream TrueHD alongside 4K (and the ability to stream it backwards via eARC. ‘Problem’ could be that the TV needs to be able to passthrough this format and most tv’s aren’t able to. There have been a couple on the market since 2018 but they are still in the premium price class.

So, without eARC on your TV, no TrueHD Atmos sound on your soundbar. Sonos could have added an input HDMI with passthrough on the shoundbar (like competative brands do) but has decided not to. Not sure why, because the whole eARC thing is kind of futuristic, however, I believe that most customers would use streaming services anyway (and therefore only DD+ Atmos, which works fine).

Hello All,

I was going to place an order for Arc (my first Sonos device) but I am impressed by the negative with all this problem related to AUDIO in a device of this price.
My Samsung TV does not have HDMI eARC so I will not be able to enjoy the Dolby Atmos function by now.
For the price difference (€ 899 vs € 699) I would like to know your opinion\advice if I will be better served by buying the Playbar + 2 OneSL instead of Arc (buying the Sub on a later stage).

Or probably wait until all this issues to be resolved, properly tested and then move to the Arc?

For all the discussion I have read here it seems to me that Arc does not seem to be mature enough as announced by Sonos (“featuring eleven high-performance drivers for crisp highs, dynamic midranges, and surprising bass”) and it wouldn't be nice to have a device that looks “incomplete” and patch-dependent

Remember people with negative feedback are ALWAYS more vocal than those satisfied and happy with their products. There’s MANY that got their Arcs played their music and movies and didnt push the volume or bass level too high and never noticed any issues. The Arc sounds great it does have a brighter sound signature than the Playbar but for movies and tv it sounds better IMO. The bass issue is going to be rectified.

I think it all depends on what you value if you want to future proof your system (* you will get an eARC TV in a few years probably) and you want alexa, airplay 2.0 and better looks (more modern). Or you dont care about atmos or any of that and just want a good soundbar

I don’t agree with you. You make the assumption that people with ‘negative’ feedback (I’d say critical but whatever) pushed their volume or bass too high. If you took your time in reading what people are actually giving feedback about, you would read that this issue occurs also at low sound volumes (yesterday I played Suicide Squad with bass -6, still the issue occurred). There is also a difference for some people between video (Let’s say eac3 DD) and audio (Spotify) playback, which may be managed by different balancing profiles. Not sure though.

Also, this video I believe says it all. It’s proof of a way the Sonos Arc processes a certain bandwidth, other than it should as you can see on a comparative device.

Therefore, there is an urgency to fix this, as people want to enjoy their premium soundbar as they would expect. Above that, in case it’s not a software issue, people want to be able to return their product within the returning period.

P

pyro225

Enthusiast II

Don’t think you need eArc for Atmos. Currently most services offering Atmos will work with normal HDMI Arc. I think eArc might be needed for some Blu-ray movies though, and in the future it might become more widely used. But by then you’ll have a new TV anyway!

You need eARC for proper, lossless dolby atmos. Through regular ARC, you can get compressed Atmos, wrapped as dolby digital plus. This is what many streaming services support but it's lossy and not a patch on the sound you get from dolby atmos/truehd from a 4k bluray.

Exactly. Dolby Atmos is nothing more than some sort of metadata. The audio can either be wrapped in Dolby TrueHD or in Dolby Digital Plus. TrueHD is the BluRay format (and also applicable for br-rips). DD+ is what streaming services use, as you mentioned before. Dolby states: ‘TrueHD is able to deliver audiophile quality equivalent to uncompressed PCM without impacting HD picture quality or limiting the value-added extras that content providers may wish to include on the disc.’

(e)ARC is the abbreviation of (extended) Audio Return Channel. Don’t make the wrong assumption that this is an input port on your Sonos, it’s actually an input port on your TV with a specific band through which audio is returned to your audio device, in this case your Arc.

eARC has more bandwidth in order to be able to stream TrueHD alongside 4K (and the ability to stream it backwards via eARC. ‘Problem’ could be that the TV needs to be able to passthrough this format and most tv’s aren’t able to. There have been a couple on the market since 2018 but they are still in the premium price class.

So, without eARC on your TV, no TrueHD Atmos sound on your soundbar. Sonos could have added an input HDMI with passthrough on the shoundbar (like competative brands do) but has decided not to. Not sure why, because the whole eARC thing is kind of futuristic, however, I believe that most customers would use streaming services anyway (and therefore only DD+ Atmos, which works fine).

Hello All,

I was going to place an order for Arc (my first Sonos device) but I am impressed by the negative with all this problem related to AUDIO in a device of this price.
My Samsung TV does not have HDMI eARC so I will not be able to enjoy the Dolby Atmos function by now.
For the price difference (€ 899 vs € 699) I would like to know your opinion\advice if I will be better served by buying the Playbar + 2 OneSL instead of Arc (buying the Sub on a later stage).

Or probably wait until all this issues to be resolved, properly tested and then move to the Arc?

For all the discussion I have read here it seems to me that Arc does not seem to be mature enough as announced by Sonos (“featuring eleven high-performance drivers for crisp highs, dynamic midranges, and surprising bass”) and it wouldn't be nice to have a device that looks “incomplete” and patch-dependent

Remember people with negative feedback are ALWAYS more vocal than those satisfied and happy with their products. There’s MANY that got their Arcs played their music and movies and didnt push the volume or bass level too high and never noticed any issues. The Arc sounds great it does have a brighter sound signature than the Playbar but for movies and tv it sounds better IMO. The bass issue is going to be rectified.

I think it all depends on what you value if you want to future proof your system (* you will get an eARC TV in a few years probably) and you want alexa, airplay 2.0 and better looks (more modern). Or you dont care about atmos or any of that and just want a good soundbar

I don’t agree with you. You make the assumption that people with ‘negative’ feedback (I’d say critical but whatever) pushed their volume or bass too high. If you took your time in reading what people are actually giving feedback about, you would read that this issue occurs also at low sound volumes (yesterday I played Suicide Squad with bass -6, still the issue occurred). There is also a difference for some people between video (Let’s say eac3 DD) and audio (Spotify) playback, which may be managed by different balancing profiles. Not sure though.

Also, this video I believe says it all. It’s proof of a way the Sonos Arc processes a certain bandwidth, other than it should as you can see on a comparative device.

Therefore, there is an urgency to fix this, as people want to enjoy their premium soundbar as they would expect. Above that, in case it’s not a software issue, people want to be able to return their product within the returning period.

if you set a volume limit of 50% the issue seem to disappear - and the bass can be set normally have you tried this?

S

Seeky

Prominent Collaborator II

if you set a volume limit of 50% the issue seem to disappear - and the bass can be set normally have you tried this?

Yeah below 50% volume this does not happen. But you’d maybe want to listen to something louder than 50% ;-)

P

pyro225

Enthusiast II

On mine 50% is pretty loud although it’s not in the biggest room about 20sqm

F

ftm

Trending Lyricist I

On mine 50% is pretty loud although it’s not in the biggest room about 20sqm

This wouldnt be a work around for me as different sources require different volume levels on the arc.

For example my sky box requires volumes over 60% to make soundbar loud, netflix is sometimes as low as 30%

P

pyro225

Enthusiast II

Fair enough everything is either through the tv or Apple TV on mine both of which are pretty loud