In another thread, there was an indication that @Corry P was out this week, I don’t know if that will extend to another week. But tagging him may not be your best choice, and there are other forum moderators, who are equally well informed.

Unfortunately, the only Sonos employees who frequent/post in this forum are forum moderators, and not any other Sonos employees, so getting ‘official attention’ beyond the moderators, who don’t make engineering decisions, is unlikely. I would expect the moderators to be passing on the fact that there is a request, but they don’t make the decision. 

 Surround distance would be a timing thing which would be difficult to hear much different if the distance was not exactly set correctly.  I think TruePlay is setting the volume level for each surround speaker along with the distances.

 Unfortunately there is no control for the volume level of individual surround speakers after the fact.  In the old days with a different surround setup I had to do the levels with a SPL meter in the listening position.  There were also distance settings, but they had no effect on the volume level as that was already set.

 I have some hearing loss in the right ear so next time I run TruePlay I will lean slightly to the left with my phone in front of my head and see if that makes any difference.

 The ideal surround setup is with all speakers equidistant from your head which is of course impossible in a normal home.  Hence TruePlay.

But as stated before, even a little manual control over the surround speakers (with Trueplay enabled) would be helpful to have. Whilst only being able to set the distance in three different increments, it does make a difference to the surround experience. E.g. most of the time, I sit closer to my right speaker than left, therefore in previous versions of the app, I was able to set the distance for the left speaker to be greater than that of the right, which then made the surrounds sound more balanced. With this latest update, both surround speakers are forced to 10m+ with no options to tweak. I suppose having the aforementioned control back would be akin to tweaking manual volume controls on old school setups.

The only way to get manual control of the distance page is to go to the surrounds page after doing Trueplay and hit the reset button. This reverts the speaker distance to below 10ft for both of them. 

Thanks - but have you tried this in the latest iOS / Android update (80.09.09) or higher - it simply doesn’t work. You’re correct in saying that it reverts the speaker distance - but it still does not allow for the individual control of each speaker distance. This was possible in prior versions.

Yeah, it does not allow anything for individual speakers. But the bigger issue here is that Trueplay isn’t working right. Why is it measuring speaker distance wrong in the first place? And if it is, what else is it mis-measuring.

This has happened to me repeatedly (whenever an update forces re-Trueplay) but can be fixed, at least in my environment. Here is what I do, something like…

Re-do Trueplay. Hit the “reset” button. Close down the app. Restart your phone. Check to see if the surround distance is either correctly set or available to be set to one of the 3 options. 
 

Test: Play something good for checking Atmos effects.

You just need to toggle off Trueplay to enable the ‘distance’ settings for the HT surround speakers. See attached screenshots. That’s the way the S1/S2 Apps have always worked too. If it was ever different in an earlier version of the Sonos App - it was likely a software bug, rather than by design. So the option to enable the distance setting whilst Trueplay is toggled ‘on’, would have to go forward here as a ‘new feature’ request. 

There have been ‘similar’ requests in the past, but it was mostly centred around having a left/right - front/rear ‘balance’ slider-control in the Home Theatre room settings - that’s been asked for on a number of occasions here in the community, going back a few years … but it’s never been introduced (obviously). 

Yes we have understood that's not a " désired" feature by sonos techs 

But it is so useful that we want it back since trueplay is not accurate at all.

An other solution would be to provide customers full manual settings ( distance, level, delay, full eq) for all speakers ( we're not all dumb...)

Whilst my own hearing is apparently still okay I appreciate its not the case for everyone, plus my Wife and I sit in different places in our Home Theatre/Living Room and so Trueplay balance can never please both - we do compromise with the sweet-spot to get listening ‘reasonable’ for where we each sit. I’ve long campaigned for HT balance controls particularly for left/right audio level output. The current "TV Level" slider control is fine for front/rear balance. However as to whether Sonos ever go onto implement these things remains to be seen. I don’t think that there is all that much support/call for these features from users (sadly). I guess the same can be said too for having EQ presets for the various types of music and TV audio.