Sonos Arc Ultra + DTS-X / DTS-HD MA - Unlock the audio formats!

 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.