Contributor I

Arc ULTRA - lack of bass with sub Gen 2

13 replies
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In our family room I have an Arc Ultra. 2 x 300s, and a gen2 Sub. Originally it was an Arc and the Sub was great. Since updating to the Arc Ultra the Sub is really not doing much. I have read this should have been fixed but I have ran all updates and can confirm this has not been resolved. I imagine this has to do with a crossover the Arc Ultra is managing what low frequencies to send to the Sub. If feels like the Sub isn’t getting it’s part of the mix. I can gain up the sub +10 in the app and it is almost unnoticeable.

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DerekMc171Author

Contributor I

The last time I called support for my Roam it took over an hour. That was a few years ago. I don’t have that kind of time in the evenings when I get home from work anymore. What I do have is 2 minutes to fire off a post in the hopes a solution has been found. I have done enough searching to see that this is an issue others are experiencing. That would leave me to think someone should be looking into this.

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Peter_254

Prodigy II

Seems to only affect a few users, but is still a big problem.

When I bought the Ultra and Era300 I still had my Sub2, I have since switched to Sub4.

The first time I connected everything and set it up with my Sub2 I also had some challenges with my Sub2. It was not as powerful as before when it was connected to the Playbar and Play1 as a surround.

Removed the Sub2 from the system, reset it and connected it again. That helped a lot, however it never had quite the same deep sound but close. In my opinion this is because the Ultra has a built-in mini sub and thereby tones down the external Sub a bit, probably something the software does.

Have since switched to a Sub4 and have not experienced any challenges with it, currently it is set to 0 as I have neighbors and even at 0 they can complain about the house shaking when I watch movies :)

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DerekMc171Author

Contributor I

@Peter_254

Thank you for sharing your experience. That is really unfortunate. I know when I was replacing my rears with the new and exciting Era300s and swapping my Arc with the new Arc Ultra there was no discussion about compatibility issues. Like when we went from the S1 to S2 app, we knew which product would be supported. Sonos does not have that extensive of a product line that bench testing new product with existing product should be fully vetted before release. I replaced my rears to 300s before I upgraded my Arc and I remember my sub still preforming great. It was around the time I updated the arc to the arc ultra that I noticed a big difference. Sad to say that is also around the time we had app and firmware updates almost weekly to fix the horrible new app deployment. It is hard to say which was the problem in my system, change in hardware or firmware. 90% of the time my kids are watching something or listening to their kiddy stations and low frequency isn’t something I notice on that content. I can’t say exactly when the change happened. When I really noticed they were watching Pixar shorts LAVA and in the middle of the song the volcano erupts. This would normally hit real hard, but the lack of bass sent me down this rabbit hole.

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