I am a happy long time user of beam gen 2 and recently upgraded to Arc Ultra. I am very happy with the performance of the bar on its own and actually considered to add a couple of era 300’s for an ever better effect, my usecase is Movies, TV shows and Music. After reading this forum page I am a bit confused on the functionality, are the rears not working as intended for any content or is this problem confined to 5.1 content only?

Best regards! Petter 

Having had both the Arc and now the Arc Ultra with Era 100s as rears, this is how I hear it:

• In Atmos, the Arc Ultra uses a combination of the bar and the rears for the side surround channels (4 and 5) and then throws the remaining rear channels to the surrounds. The original Arc threw channels 4+ to the rears.
• In 5.1, the same virtualization happens --- the Arc Ultra helps the surrounds with channels 4 and 5. As with Atmos, the original Arc sent these channels 100% to the rears.
  (EDIT: I can’t actually get my test app to repeat this scenario right now --- it’s packaging everything in Atmos. But this is what I remember happening.)

Being honest, I actually really like the Atmos setup here. Having the bar help with channels 4 and 5 makes the whole Atmos sound bubble feel much more continuous, if that makes sense. Aside from Atmos, I think they tried to achieve the same effect with 5.1, but it leads to sometimes feeling like you want more from the rears. When you adjust the surround volume in the app, it also seems to adjust the bar volume as well (the assisted channels 4 and 5), so you can’t achieve the balance you think you can.

You’ll love the 300s as rears.

I hope all this makes sense!

This 5.1 surround sound issue is with Sonos Era 100 rears, Sonos One and Symfonisk speakers. It seems not to exist with the Era 300 rears. I guess you would be happy with this configuration.

Thank you both for taking the time to answer 🙂

I am having the same issue with the Era 300’s 

The issue described in this thread 100% exists on Era 300s as well. I haven’t tried Era 100s to compare, but the description of the problem totally mirrors my experience with the 300 and I’m hoping adjusting their behaviour will be considered too.

Really? Until now, all people with Era 300 rears have told me that they don‘t have this 5.1 surround sound issue. I have asked many people on Reddit and it seemed all Era 300 users were happy. Some of them mentioned other sound issues with their Era 300 rears, but not the exact same with 5.1 sound content (5.1 rear channel sound coming from the front). But everyone who tested it with Era 100 rears told me they tested it with the same issues.
 

In the meantime I thought about upgrading my Era 100 rears to Era 300. But now I‘m completely confused :D

Unfortunately yes, truly.

My experience is running a setup of Arc + 2 300 + Sub for almost 2 years where everything has been fine. I mostly play 5.1 content. Then I got the Ultra and played a video where some of the vocals come out from the surrounds as well as the front, and it sounded very echoey and wrong.

Then I ran a 5.1 test tone and saw the surrounds being overwhelmingly louder than the other channels, both with and without trueplay. I needed to reduce the volume of the surround channels to around -12 to make them even with the others. They were also very clearly mostly coming from the Ultra instead of the 300s, bafflingly.

I can’t imagine how these other users claim to not have this problem since it’s so crystal clear if you do any sort of investigation, maybe hardware differences could be playing a part here? But sounds too unlikely.

Hi ​@Henrique Gusso 

I think it may depend on how people are going about it. I have an Ultra and 2x Ones, and have not noticed any real issues with playing actual content. My surrounds are also at around -10, but that is because I realised they were too strong to begin with, what with them only being 2 feet from my head (gaming helped me figure this out, as with a game engine, there is no director saying “this should sound more like it is coming from the rear more than it actually is,” or whatever). It is difficult to determine the correct level when playing movies.

Only when using test videos have I actually noticed that the surround channels are playing from Ultra - when watching a movie, for example, I am unaware of it.

Having said that, I have largely been picking Atmos content to play since I got the Ultra, and Ones don’t have height drivers, of course, so that may be part of it. I am pretty sure I watched DTS 5.1 the other day and did not notice anything untoward.