Arc Ultra and Era 100’s 

I really hope they continue to work on it beyond the answer they gave.  

I dont understand why there is any need for “surround” from the front, ESPECIALLY when you have rear speakers. 

Received the arc ultra yesterday and this is happening for me with one SL surrounds. 

• arc ultra
• sub 4
• one SL surrounds

any 5.1 rear content content gets over taken by (I assume the upmixing of) the front speakers of the arc ultra. I’d much prefer 5.1 content to play rear signals only on the rear speakers I set up. Didn’t have this problem with beam gen 2. 

Hi, 

I was using a Arc, Sub3 and two Symfonisk as surround and the result was AMAZING. I upgraded to the Arc Ultra to get a better dialog clarity (the only thing my previous setup was lacking a bit) and immediately I heard something was very wrong.

Surround speakers were almost muted, and pushing the surround volume in the setting was only making the sound from the Arc Ultra louder, completely messing spacialization. 

Trueplay (the "basic one") made no difference for this issue. 

I then made a lot of testing, using various sources and test files, and discovered that the issue completely disappears with Dolby Atmos, were I get a perfect spacialization. On the other hand , any 5.1 content is wrong (rear sound coming from the Arc Ultra). Even with Dolby Digital Plus 5.1.

This sounds like a routing / decoder issue of some sort. 

The net result of my 1000€ upgrade is that I can't enjoy my content anymore, and since a few months now

Tldr: 5.1 content is broken with Arc Ultra and Symfonisk rears, Atmos is OK, and I had no issues with a regular Arc. 

Exactly the same for all of us

Sonos techs will answer : it is "by design"

I recommend write to  ceo@sonos.com (email) and refering to the thread. Senior Member Customer Experience Team should give a correct answer.

Hi Everyone

Just to keep you all informed, I have been discussing the feedback you have all provided here with a senior engineer, and it will all be passed on to our audio team for consideration. I can’t make any promises as to what changes (if any) will be made, or when, but I do want to let you all know that you are being heard.

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.

That’s an interesting input. My distance to the rears is much more far away, around 3m (~ 10 feet) to my listening position. With 5.1 surround I can barely hear anything from my rears. Whatever I try, the sound seems to come from the front.

Hi ​@Zorro88 

It’s possible that the surrounds are not playing when they should - please reboot your Arc Ultra by removing power for a time.

It can also sometimes help to remove the surrounds, then add them on again.

However, as stated, it is important to test with content you know will produce clear surround sound effects. The best example that comes to mind is the first few seconds of the first Transformers movie - even before the movie starts, there’s great surround effects during the Paramount company logo animation - as the flying stars go behind the camera, you should clearly hear the “Transformer” noise come from the surrounds.

I hope this helps.

I just rebooted the Arc Ultra again with removing the power for a few minutes: nothing changed. Additional I have resetted my Sonos home cinema (Arc Ultra + Era 100 rears) already multiple times in the past and added it again to the app. Nothing changed.

And it seems here is some missunderstanding. Of course I can hear the rears very good with some soundtracks. Dolby Atmos or 7.1 soundtracks are perfect with sound all around. I would absolutely be happy with it. It is an isolated issue for 5.1 soundtracks. It has to be something wrong with the upscaling process from 5.1 to the 9.1 channels of the soundbar.

Sonos upscales 5.1 surround to this virtual 9.1 speaker arrangement (rear channel 4 + 5 in circles). In this case the channels 6,7,8 and 9 are nearly silent (in our case the rears):

To fix this issue Sonos should route during 5.1 surround the 4th and 5th channel to channel 8 and 9 on their virtualized 9.1 sound system. So we could still get real sound from behind, exactly like it is specified in the 5.1 speaker specifications.

This is all my own opinion, because of my deep investigation and testing. But the picture shows exactly what my sound system sounds like with 5.1 soundtracks. And it explains everything why soundtracks with more channels don‘t produce this issue.

Hi ​@Zorro88 

I concur, and mentioned this in my report to my engineer colleague.

To be clear, if the surrounds perform correctly in any way for a prolonged period (like the length of a movie), then troubleshooting as I suggested above need not be done. What you are reporting is variance in behaviour across different formats, which can and should be provided as feedback (which has been taken - thank you!), but does not require troubleshooting. Apologies if I just wasted your time there.