Beam Gen 2 - sudden full volume hammering sound

  • 28 December 2021
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93 replies

C

I also had a great Beam 2 experience today when out of the blue the machine gun sound broke lose. I was in the garden, my little one sat in front of it listening to a radio play. I called the German support - the guy found an article about it -without solution! It seems like they still dont know whats going on. Beam 2 can cause real physical harm. I'm wondering if someone is already having an acute hearing loss because of this thing. Someone should sue Sonos in the US.

They will now send me a replacement. Dont know if I can ever trust this device again.

T

I just experienced this on my Beam Gen 2 that I bought for Black Friday (3 weeks ago).  My wife was watching TV when the Sound bar malfunctioned and sounded like a Jack Hammer going off in our home.  We ran out of the house in our socks in the middle of a snowstorm because we thought something was going to explode.  This was a terrible experience!

 

The fact that this has been happening for 11 months and there is no fix is unacceptable. 

 

Does Sonos have plans to acknowledge and address this issue?

T

I have the exact same issue,  its really a deafening sound and my ears hurt each time it happens. I and am being told just to do a reset on it / my hopes are low...

 

It has happened 4 times for us already, once when the TV was running, once when nothing was on, once when the beam was in group mode, each time the family freaked out.

 

I made a video of when it happened last (only managed to catch the last few seconds). Can upload if interested.

S

Sonos replaced my Beam2 now and the new one has not had the issue so far.

Hi! I replaced my Beam2 today, what about your Beam2? Still having the issue?

I just experienced this on my Beam Gen 2 that I bought for Black Friday (3 weeks ago).  My wife was watching TV when the Sound bar malfunctioned and sounded like a Jack Hammer going off in our home.  We ran out of the house in our socks in the middle of a snowstorm because we thought something was going to explode.  This was a terrible experience!

 

The fact that this has been happening for 11 months and there is no fix is unacceptable. 

 

Does Sonos have plans to acknowledge and address this issue?

TBH, I just got my SONS Beam Gen2 Delivery, after a rally with the carrier uh!, Anyway I’m starting to be worried about this issue, and thinking to return back everything to SONOS, before the returning policy ending. I prayer not happen to me.Lastly, any advice before this issue happen? Like be worry not to ...etc 

I

I got a Beam 2 recently from Costco and had this problem a couple of times. But then for a while after the most recent software update nothing happened. Until today.

Every time it happened during music playback via Airplay.

Returning this to Costco and getting a replacement. Not very hopeful that's going to solve anything tbh. Very concerning that this issue has been going on for so long and Sonos hasn't had a fix.

V

I’ve had this issue (or something similar) as well -- and reported it with diagnostics but no resolution. For me it is:

  1. Random, but overall infrequent (it can go weeks without it)
  2. Generally once it happens, it will happen a second (and possibly a 3rd time) within a very short period after (within 20 minutes).
  3. After about 30 seconds, the noise stops (and the Beam 2 disappears from the app - as it reboots).

The most recent occurrence (in the past week) changed though - it  was silent. So audio just dropped but like I noted above, the Beam 2 rebooted itself and then it did it again a few minutes later. So either:

  1. I hit a variation of the issue or,
  2. They pushed out a “fix” to at least make the fail less panic inducing.

 

J
Userlevel 1
Badge +4

Same thing happen to me just now and it scared the crap out of me and my family(including a 2 month old baby sitting on a swing right next to the beam and a 3 yr old watching TV). This is outrageous! I only wish the kids don’t get PTSD from the blasting machine gun sound. I’m not keeping this faulty product. Not worth it. I fear it’s going to happen again and I won’t even try to troubleshoot it. I’m using beam 2 with samsung frame tv. 

Was it brand new??  Or have you had it a while?  If you don’t just do a straight return and try to RMA / fault find, be ready for multiple attempts to reproduce to get the logs uploaded.  

V

Adding a link to another thread (closed) in the forum on the same topic.

 

 

 

S
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

So this just happened to me yesterday while watching HBO. Bought my beam gen 2 in 2021 and never had an issue with it before. When it happened it was not as loud as some of you describe but it was the same sound. It also seemed as if the beam lost connection to my LG OLED because when I tried to turn down the volume (I thought the sound was related to what I was seeing) it was as if I was adjusting the tv’s speakers and not the beam. 

 

Quick question - do you guys have trueplay turned on when it happens? Something tells me that the issue is related to software and the difference in my scenario was that yesterday I updated the firmware and for the first time in quite a while used trueplay.

W

Just finally found this thread after having the exact same issue 4 times with my Beam. Twice today. Is there no fix?!

Doesn’t seem like it.  They just sent me a new one but have to wait till my kids aren’t home to test it.  For the price of the whole system I shouldn’t have to worry like this.  My fear is that the issue shows up a month from now and they tell me to reproduce it when it seems to happen at random.

S

I had the same thing happen to me on 2 occasions.  My 6 year old daughter was shocked traumatised and upset by the sudden loud machine gun hammering noise.  Product is just 2 weeks old.  Is there a fix for this?  

J
Userlevel 1

After resetting it worked for a few days. Sound on the right side was back to normal. 

Friday night went to sleep with my LoFi playlist on spotify going. The beam is in our bedroom FYI, 5:30am on Saturday morning while I'm still asleep the hammering started again at 100% volume. I dove out of bed and almost had a heart attack, I was fuming and super angry. I could have thrown the damn thing out the Window I was that angry.  Although this time I was prepared and had wired in a Ikea Tradfri power outlet switch so I could cut the power to the beam with a the Ikea remote.

I Left it off untill around 10am, decided to turn it back on.  At 10:23am exactly it went off again. This time I managed to capture some footage of it happening. 

After that I was over it, I put the beam back in the box and took it back to the store. Sadly they had none In stock so I had to drive back to another store which was actually closer to my house. 

I showed them the video and they gave me a new one. They also recommended that I buy the extended warranty while there which I was more than pleased to do. So I've now got 3 years replacement/refund warranty on hand for when it happens again. 

I had also ordered a second white coloured beam which had been on back order and that arrived at my house  today. So I'm hoping the replacement and the new one don't have the same issues.  

I do feel like this is some sort of software bug though since it's Inconsistsnt and happens randomly. Hopefully the sonos engineering team gets on top of this before they end up with a mountain of returned Beams! 

 

 

U

Just finally found this thread after having the exact same issue 4 times with my Beam. Twice today. Is there no fix?!

Doesn’t seem like it.  They just sent me a new one but have to wait till my kids aren’t home to test it.  For the price of the whole system I shouldn’t have to worry like this.  My fear is that the issue shows up a month from now and they tell me to reproduce it when it seems to happen at random.


Has anyone figured out how to replicate it? I tried leaving my TV/streaming app running for hours but couldn’t make it happen. 

S

I saw a guy saying that this was fixed by a software update, but turns out it is still recurring. Really puts me off buying the Beam though I really like it in every other aspect. Can someone reassure me that what's happening here are mostly isolated cases? 

D

Glad I found this thread. 

I’ve had the exact same experience with my Beam (gen 2). It has happened seven times in three months of usage.

Is the consensus that this is a hardware issue, only fixed with a replacement?

 

A

My Replacement-Beam runs better but not perfect, it crashed again in same way as above BUT with more silent „machine-Gun-Sound“ at Living-Room-noise-level. Rest of the Behavior was identical: It crashed (no reaction of Keys or Commands from Smartphone/Sonos-App, rest of 5.1-Setup (Rear+Sub) fall silent immediately.) and  does self-restarting/resetting after appr. 30sec. after that, normal operation…

R

Just had it happen for a second time in the same day and I was able to run a diagnostic during the sound. Hopefully that helps figure out what’s causing this. Definitely going back to Costco if Sonos can’t resolve this. 

Sonos replaced my Beam 2 two months ago and today it just happened again, at a much lower volume, on my new Beam 2. Not sure what to do at this point, guess return it and buy something else? Clearly this isn’t resolved. 

V

I had the issue occur again .. multiple times late last night and again this morning. I collected diags and called support .. they look at the diags, but then ask me to play TV audio with expectation that the issue will occur while they are on the phone. This is extremely unlikely, as I’ve told them repeatedly that the issue can occur several times in rapid succession, but then not occur for another few hours or days.

 

I captured a video of it happening this morning:

https://ufile.io/429v3h2a

 

You can see the show on the TV with the sound doing its messed up machine-gun/stuttering thing. Then I hit pause, but the messed up sound keeps going - until it stops as the Beam Gen 2 resets itself. I offered to send this video to technical support to help show what the issue is, but they did not seem all that interested.

 

Other observations (trying to capture any additional data):

  • It may just be me, but it actually kind of seems that the pitch of the noise is related to whatever the actual sound was when the trigger happens.
    • For example, If you are watching an show where there is somebody singing in a higher pitch and the trigger happens, then the stutter seems to be a higher pitch.
    • On the other hand, if all that is happening is low dramatic music then the pitch seems to be lower. 

Tech support also keeps asking me if I encounter this when streaming Music (ie: not watching TV or movie). I don’t really listen to Music on my home theater setup, so I can’t comment on that. Not sure if anybody else out there who has seen this issue can comment?

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