ERA 300 as surrounds missing front firing driver

+1

@SONOS - can you tell us about your plans?

Hi I just bought the two 300 speakers am not happy at all centre speaker not working I got them for only surround sound and no centre speaker working a joke 

Er - are you saying they aren’t working properly?  The centre drivers aren’t supposed to be in use for surround duty. As I understand it, the 300s work properly with surround using the other drivers. The front drivers are for stereo, where, obviously, they are essential.

if you listen to stereo on your Eras, or for Atmos as surrounds, what do you identify as missing? From my experience, if you switched on front drivers, you could lose the proper surround effect, and add some muddiness. I’m really not sure what the point would be of adding something just for the sake of it.

Nowhere has this been mentioned and people are finding this out as they go along, I think this is the point OP was trying to make. Since the top/side speakers are firing in all directions, it IS very noticeable that the front one is missing as the sound is VERY low.

Clearly though it’s ‘by design’ and quite likely adding the front driver into the mix is going to muddy the surround sound audio channels and maybe narrow the stage - I don’t find the sound low at all compared to when I swap-out the 300’s for Ones - the 300’s are much better sounding and definitely not lower in volume.

I noticed the missing front driver as well with my current set up: Era 300s as rear surrounds along with Sonos Arc and Sonos Sub.

I removed the surround sound set up and stereo paired my Era 300s for comparison purposes.

I grouped this set up with my Arc and Sub and i could hear the fronts on my 300s when streaming regular music thus adding more volume compared to my previous set up.  However, when playing spatial audio, the sound was much better when my 300s were set up as rear surrounds.

The same applies to watching Dolby Atmos movies.  Just sounded so much better in terms of separation and flow.

I will tell you this.  I think the stereo paired 300s grouped with my Arc and Sub did sound better when playing my turntable.

So with all that being said, i do appreciate the flexibility that comes with these speakers.  So if I want to spin some vinyl, I can easily make a quick change to my set up to satisfy my listening experience.  So far, my wife and i love these Era 300s.  We have been rocking Sonos since 2014 and we love them!!

hey, just finding this!

I only use my Sonos arc,| sub, and era 300’s for music, and when I figured out the front drivers can’t be used when listening to music, I was super bummed.

did you find a workaround somehow!

i am not tech savvy, just curious if I understood what you wrote 

I hate to beat a dead horse, but I just “upgraded” my Ones to era 300s yesterday with the Fathers Day discount… and they are being returned tomorrow. Yes they sound better with Atmos, but for music they need the center driver to compete with my ones. I tried them in stereo with one sub and they sound great, and probably better with my 2nd sub, but of course the app wouldn’t let me add it. Anyway is it really that hard to add the option of the center driver when not listening to Atmos??

Are you using the Era 300s as Home Theatre surrounds then, or as a stereo pair?

50/50. My house is an open concept with only one system in my TV room. Arc, 2 subs, 2 ones. When not watching TV I like to tell Alexa to play music which I can hear all over the house. 

When I changed the ones out for the 300s, the system sounded cheap during music, but great during Atmos. So then I paired the 300s with one of my subs, and the center driver made a world of difference in the sound.  I literally spent all day switching arrangements and doing trueplay lol 

Anyway imo there should be an option to have the center driver playing during music…

Perhaps feed your request through to Sonos, or at least speak with them and see if they may have this idea in the pipeline already. If you do decide to do that, in addition to returning your speakers, then you can contact them here:

https://support.sonos.com/s/contact

Perhaps mention you wanted to add two subs to a stereo pair of Era-300s too.

I don’t have any hope that Sonos will enable the front firing speakers for stereo sound when it is used in a 5.1 or 5.2 home theater setting. There were so many requests in this regards anlready when the Era 300 came out and nothing has changed. It is really frustrating with Sonos. They encourage you to provide a request but nothing happens. I send them already so many requests which should be a no brainer to do and quickly to realize and they would improve the user experience a lot, but nothing changed. I tried to contact the CEO, talking to customer support, wrote a ticket and communicate here. Nothing of it has been realized so far.

Thanks so much for this thread you have all helped me save a lot of money, I won’t be purchasing these speakers whilst this issue continues.  I will also say that whilst I love the sound of my sonos system I have found that Sonos has a huge issue when it comes to understanding their customers and their customers experience across the board from their app to how these speakers connect from the very first time you buy your first Sonos speaker. Definitely not a system for people who don’t understand networking. You probably need to bring in a new team to help you rethink your customer user experience strategy as what you are doing and what you have been doing isn’t working well for you in my opinion. I wish you all the best Sonos. 

I agree with you Michael. Sonos is not what it used to be and stand for in the past. The hardware is great, but the user friendliness of the app, the quality of the app, mesh network quality when multiple rooms are involved and the reaction time to customers requests is getting worse and worse.

An option to turn the front speaker on in the settings on/off would solve the issue. Same when it is stereo content it would make sense to turn the front firing speaker on automatically.

I used to be a Sonos advocate but can’t say I am that anymore and would not invest the same anymore into Sonos.

I agree ..if users prefer to have also front speaker with era 300 should be possible to enable it when configured as surround ..but now Sonos have a very bad new app so I think are concentrated to solve lots of issue.. Sonos is not anymore what was at the beginning ..I paid lots of money for the set up and I have lots of issue and every request o saw from other users or feature needed never arrived .so...I'm thinking to sell all 

I just bought Era 300’s, arch and Gen 3 sub. Saw the Arch Ultra and Gen 4 sub were coming out so just preordered those.

now that I have my setup playing and not having the option for front drivers on my Era 300’s I’m returning my entire setup and canceling my preorder.

Great job Sonos you just lost $5,000 for not listening to your client base

Not everything the client base wants is good for them. Sonos deemed the front speakers too overbearing in this use case. I tend to believe them, though Sonos might explain it better.

Perhaps they need to communicate this better then as most people seem to be finding out after the purchase 

If you read about Sonos’ product development cycle you’ll see they spend a lot of time (and money) ensuring the amplification circuitry, speaker drivers and enclosure work together. They have a listening panel who vet and tune the products. 
 

I would assume this panel are the ones that decided the front-firing speakers “spoiled” the sound when configured as surrounds. 
 

Since we’ve all bought Sonos products because we like the sounds they produce, isn’t there a risk that this reputation would be spoilt if the sound didn’t always met their standards? 

its all about communication and giving people the choice I am not questioning the sound quality they sound great playing music ,then you add them as surround and then play music again and it is a very deflating experience. so what about those standards ? 

I tried asking Sonos about this today. I let thim know I had preordered the new Arc Ultra, Sub Gen 4, and 2 Era 300's and I had just found out that I would not be able to use the main front speaker in the Era 300 unless I manually reconfigured the system to separate components each time I wanted to listen to music. What is the use in having speakers costing $450 each if the main sound producing element cannot be turned on for music? I explained that after reading about this I realized people have been asking about this since the Era 300 was released, and that Sonos had not provided a response. I stated that I would like an actual reply instead of being added as a number in the Feature Request system.

I started with online chat, and after a long discussion was told they did not have any answers, that I would not be able to request a reply to my question through them, and to call the phone number for higher level technical support if I wanted more info. I called technical support and was told by "Level 1" that they did not know if there was any effort to allow users to switch to a mode allowing stereo surround with Era 300's for listening to music. They transferred me to "Level II" where I spoke with a supervisor who said he has been receiving requests for this issue since the Era 300 came out, but he had not received any word about if Sonos were even considering a fix. I asked for his supervisor or for someone who could provide some actual information, and he said he would message "Level III" support to ask them.

I waited on hold...for a long time...with him coming back every few minutes to tell me Level III had not replied. In the end, the Level II supervisor said he would email me with the reply once Level III replied to him. I was on the phone with them for a total of 94 minutes after being on chat for at least an additional half hour, and ended with no information. All levels of support were professional and tried their best to help, but they just did not have any information to work with other than verifying the Era 300's turn off the front speaker when in theater mode and that you can manually separate and reconfigure the speakers as a new system in the app to use the Era's full potential for stereo music listening. 

The Level II supervisor asked if I had asked my question in the Community, and I let him know I had read about many others who had already asked the question in the Community (and on other forums), that many people have said they would be returning their systems or not buying a system from Sonos because of the issue, and that Sonos has not provided any replies. 

I'll update this if I end up receiving a reply from Sonos, but it's not looking good. I am now considering returning my preorder. Theater surround is important for movies, but I love music and had purchased the system thinking I would be able to use it for stereo music as well.

Sonos, if you value your customers please provide a reply to this significant issue. It would seem from an outside perspective that the app could be programmed to allow the user to select a music settings which would enable all speaker elements for stereo misic (or even to select specific speakers in case someone just wants to use the Era 300's as the only stereo speakers). As MichaelGG just commented, we need some communication on this. Thanks!

P.s. After reading through this discussion on the Sonos Community (which is closed for comment), it seems that it was confirmed 11 months ago by Sonos to be feasible. Not sure why it hasn't been addressed further. 

I would think it is feasible, in the same way EQ sound profiles, or adding DTS-X/HD codecs to a Sonos Home Theatre are feasible, but it doesn’t mean that Sonos will implement these things. It might ‘muddy’ the soundstage for example and not reproduce the overall output that the sound engineers are trying to replicate from an artists original recording.

Anyhow Sonos are clearly aware of the request from some users and it’s a now just a case of waiting to see what they may do about it. You can always cancel your pre-order if you prefer to wait and see. Also Sonos rarely mention their development roadmap when it comes to these type of user requests, at least not until shortly before implementing the requested changes.

I have the Arc, 300’s & Sub and personally speaking I think the setup sounds great for both music and TV audio …and by that I mean for ALL the various audio codecs that the setup supports, Stereo, Atmos audio etc.

Howdy! Good thoughts. I could wait, but I am in need of speakers now because using the TV speakers for music and movies is slowly crushing my soul. Since this issue has been known to Sonos for quite some time, I hoped they would have answers which would coincide with the new speaker releases.

The sound may be optimal without the front driver in some formats, but I would like the option to turn on the front driver if I decide I'd like more stereo surround... for instance if we are having other families over with kids running around where we don't need the center of the room focused experience. Many people across the internet have asked for this feature because it would help.

Either way, I hope Sonos will respond soon with information. Thanks!