That’s what’s holding me back from purchasing an Ultra.

Sonos rarely announces future products and features.  I don’t recall they have ever announced audio formats in advance.  DTS-X/HD has been request for a long time without any movement on Sonos part.  It also seems like the volume of requests have tailed off quite a bit.

Indeed, i guess the phrase “beating a dead horse” comes to mind. 

Sonos should listen to their customers, if they learned anything in the past 9 months of business.

I am hopeful they will implement it.

Ultra is a bit strange in the name I suppose.

It's all been conscious decisions from Sonos but at the price point the Ultra is at, pretty much all the reviews, whilst lauding the sound, mention the continued lack of HDMI ports and DTS decoding as negatives.

Pretty much all soundbars at this price point have at least HDMI passthrough so you don't lose a port or have more than two to actually gain some and DTS decoding.

In a way you can kind of get it for their other soundbars (excluding Arc for me), but in a flagship ‘Ultra’ model definitely seems a miss for me.

If Sonos has evaluated the demand they must also have some idea of the percentage of their users who want the extra formats.
 

If they were to  offer the extra formats for a fee, as you suggest, they will still need to cover the full development costs upfront (including testing). There may also be additional hardware costs. They then end up with 2 or 3 variants of a product, all of which need to be supported and maintained. 
 

To me, that doesn’t make sense. 

At the price point the Ultra is, supposed licensing cost should be an irrelevance.  Like it is/was on £50 players.

Evaluating demand isn't as simple checking analytics on use of existing products because the information isn't available there.  It's usually as simple as ‘Do the competition do it? ‘… (do they do analysis?….) so shouldn't we?….

​@Windybey I would guess that since the Arc Ultra supports Multichannel PCM audio, the demand for physical media is in decline, and there are a very limited amount of films with a DTS:X audio track compared to the number of films with a Dolby Atmos audio track, Sonos decided the added cost to them and the consumer for supporting lossless DTS audio isn’t worth it.

I’m not even sure there is a good reason for not including it on all their soundbars these days. When Samsung, Hisense, Sony, Yamaha and others have support for DTS-X in their sub £300 soundbars, it is more difficult to justify its absence on Sonos soundbars from a competitor feature perspective.

Sony have the only streaming service I’m aware of (Bravia Core) which supports streaming DTS-HD/X, TrueHD Atmos along with full 4K video. Combined with being one of the few Blueray player sellers left and the PS consoles that gives Sony a self-serving reason to include both Dolby/DTS HD and Atmos/DTS-X support, even for products targeting streaming users.

LG stand out along with Sonos as being one of the few trying not to include DTS, but even LG backtracked their decision to completely remove DTS from their TVs.

In the mass market I think the lack of DTS/DTS-HD/X is a non-issue for the majority of buyers, I personally won’t buy a product without support for them because I do have DVDs, blurays and Bravia Core and for the product type/price range I’m paying there is no sensible justifiable reason for it to be missing.

In reality the number of times I actually use DTS codecs is getting lower and lower. Even the few blurays I purchase these days have Atmos rather than DTS.

Dolby out-manoeuvred/marketed/undercut Xperi in the consumer market and got DD(+) into digital broadcasting and Atmos into homes via video streaming, gaming and music streaming.

It’s difficult to see a future in the consumer market for DTS at the moment, like vhs vs Betamax, dvd-hd vs Blu-ray, while potentially being technically better, Xperi failed to market and sell it successfully. Even Play-Fi had potential to be a vendor agnostic solution, but in reality is still a bit of an unreliable mess in a tiny amount of products.

Someone here long ago suggested Sonos was involved in a lawsuit with whoever owned DTS at the time. That’s the only thing that ever made sense to me.

That would be interesting. I’ve always worked under the assumption that XPERI, who owns DTS, was still charging a fee for use of their codec. Between that, and the (perceived) small number of people who want it, it never seemed to make financial sense for Sonos to pay for licensing across every single speaker they make, for an extremely corner case. But that’s an assumption. Even if the licensing cost is zero, the cost of writing and maintaining the codec isn’t, and given the small numbers of people (albeit vocal) who ‘want it’, it just may not be on Sonos’ roadmap. Especially as it seems to be waning in use, in favor of Atmos. That doesn’t change all the previously encoded discs, of course, but if it is truly a fading codec, I can see why Sonos isn’t anxious, especially right now, in adding it. 

Who’s to say DTS formats won’t gain traction again. Not having it seems odd.

Maybe Dolby Pro-Logic, or mono will make a resurgence, too!

They eventually added support for  Dolby pro logic. I heard it myself with my Playbase Panasonic setup. Not having full DTS support at this price point is gouging the customers.

Seems they will add things that don't cost them. Given the latest finance reports maybe that will help them limp along a bit longer.

I would not benefit much from being able to use these formats since my 2019 Samsung TV does not recognise them, but since I hope to use my Sonos stuff longer than the TV, having it would be nice.

I suppose there’s not technical reason why these formats do not work on Sosnos - they where able to ad normal DTS to my Beam (gen 1) via a software update.

Exactly, the addition of the original DTS AC3 codec seems to coincide with the patent expiring at which point it became royalty free. What is currently branded as DTS-CA (core audio) and DTS-HD, DTS-X has royalties/licensing fees.

Even having simple DTS would make many users’ setups much simpler.  DTS—X and MA etc. all carry the lower quality DTS audio.

Sonos has supported basic DTS for at least a couple of years now.

Except they already have the development and test costs for the royalty free DTS/AC3 codec. Part of that cost on the development side is likely reduced by it being an included codec in whatever main audio library they are using, (ffmpeg maybe) 

Given how long they haven’t paid for DTS licenses and what they brand as home theatre products being targeted at streaming services not home theatre, they aren’t likely to add it now. If they were targeting home theatre then there would be more than just the lone hdmi arc port and full DTS support on the more expensive products from day one.

Even having just a single hdmi with passthrough would be better than the current offerings, but that previously would have lead to more churn on the hardware side to stay relevant as hdmi versions were replaced and more significantly for Sonos, lower margins or an even higher price for an already over priced range of products.

They do. The royalty free DTS/AC3 codec, which is the 5.1 core has been in the home theatre products for a while now.

What they can’t do is market having DTS Core Audio (DTS-CA) support or branding because that is tied up to Xperi rebranding the DTS offerings and falls into royalty/licensing.

Aah, I hadn't realised it was also on Arc Ultra, apologies. I'd mistakenly read the issue as being unable to play the discs (at all) with the DTS-X audio, not that they could play but not with the the higher bitrate audio.

Having said that, I still find it bizarre that a nominal licensing fee in an ‘Ultra’ premium, top of the range product is an issue - especially when all rivals do it.

I appreciate your input, some great perspective. I thought to add a codec to an existing platform would require only a small amount of development time. I believe, a premium soundbar should give the users/customers the option to use it how they desire. This is the only soundbar across the entire market which i know of that doesnt support it.

Its a miss, i hope they make a change.

Off the top of my head B&O stand out as a premium brand which only supports Dolby.

Both the Beosound Stage (£1800+) and the BeoSound Theatre (~£8,500+) which link up to the equally expensive speakers (£2500+ each) for surround only supports the Dolby codecs.

There will be others and I think it comes down to intended market/purpose. B&O for example advertise them for connecting to the TV and multiroom, rather than as a direct AVR (Home theatre) replacement, so with streaming services and broadcast TV there is no real use case for DTS.

In a similar way, some manufacturers support Bluetooth, chromecast and airplay, some only one or two out the three. The price/level of the product seems to have little bearing on which is included. Harman Kardon, for example stand out as having zero airplay support across their whole range.