FEATURE REQUEST: Add option to enable "Center speakers" for the ERA's 300, if they are added as surrounds

Adding my plus one to this idea: the performance of the Era 300 as a musical stereo pair is sublime, and I’ve spent quite a few hours trying to debug why the speakers felt significantly less punchy after pairing them as surrounds with the Arc. No amount of trueplaying worked to bring that back.

I understand there’s quite some engineering behind this choice, so not questioning the sensible defaults. I’d love the option to enable the center channel for my particular living room.

100% agree, we use the living room surround Eras for obviously movies (which sounds amazing) and music, but more music to be honest. We need the option between watching movies or listening to music, so we can maximize all of the drivers. The wife wants me to switch back to the surround Ones when we listen to music, it’s that bad of an experience…

Gets my vote 🙋🏻 … there’s no doubt they sound wonderful right now but it would be great to at least have the option. Thanks

Struggling to understand why you guys miss this every time. We want a surround sound system for watching movies that then turns into a music system when listening to music using the same hardware. Which is kind of its main selling point for hardcore users. It’s just software, it really is. Not saying it’s easy but it’s just the software.

I would like to see that feature implemented. Buying two Era’300 when the center is disabled in a surround setup for music is no go for me.

I am postponing any ERA 300 purchase until the above requested center speaker function is implemented. 

This is a great feature request, but I want to amend it. Please reply if you think this is a better or worse suggestion.

For music playback, it would be ideal if enabling main drivers in ERA 300 also made ERA 300 the main speakers (along with the sub). The Arc could be disabled or relegated to “ambient”.

In my opinion, the Arc is not that great at music so I would rather turn around and face the ERA 300 for the music experience.

@Zanellato Fabio, users were originally told by a Sonos employee that the center firing driver and the height driver would be used as part of the rear surround channels when used as surrounds. As users have begun receiving them and holing them up, many have found, like you did, that the center channel is completely disabled when used as surrounds - even when playing music. Many are finding this makes for a crippled surround experience. 

This thread is being marked as a feature request thread to ask Sonos to enable the ability for the user to choose in the app, whether to enable use of the center firing as driver. 

UPDATE:

SONOS replied with an E-mail today, so just wanted to let u know guys.

I’m a member of the Escalation Team here at Sonos Support.
Your initial email has been shared with our CEO. Patrick, however, cannot reply to all the contacts he receives and as such a case was created in our customer care system and escalated to a Senior Technician to address your feedback.

Thank you for your feedback on our new products and your cooperation! I can tell you that our engineers are already aware of your community post, but I will make sure to bring your case to their attention as well. 

I can't promise when or if this will happen, but we love getting feedback from our customers! 

Adding to this request. 
 

Replaced my rear 5s with 300s today. 
 

We listen to a lot of music in this room, as well as watching movies. 
 

A lot of stereo mixed music. 

The 300s are great for theatre. They are crap for music with the center channels turned off. Now the music is primarily from the arc, when it used to be from a pair of 5s, set to “full” & +3 for music playback. 
 

I tried the 300s as a stereo pair with a sub mini in another room, replacing stereo 1s. It was a big improvement. 

I feel you're missing the mark here, giving us a weird, niche product that is less well-rounded by the decision to turn off the center channel. 

I especially feel duped by Sonos not informing their customers of this in a clear and transparent manner, which is an issue Sonos had demonstrated in the past, (ie Moves won't stereo pair on Bluetooth, etc). 

As someone heavily invested in Sonos gear, adding another 1k purchase that lacks basic usability is deeply disappointing. 
 

After replacing my Sonos One’s with the Era 300’s in surround set-up, testing, being less than impressed with anything non-ATMOS, and then reading most of the comments on this forum… here are my findings. Any non-ATMOS input signal (e.g. DD 5.1, DTS 5.1, DD 2.0 pro logic II) will only use the outward facing tweeter on the Era 300’s. So effectively only 1 of the 4 tweeters will be in use for anything non-ATMOS. That is the reason why they sound so underwhelming with non-ATMOS content. While I understand SONOS’ reasoning that the center tweeter should be disabled, for me the bigger issue is that the inward facing side tweeters are also disabled. SONOS should simply have the surround signal be assigned to both side tweeters for a wider soundstage (similar to a Dipole Surround Speaker). One could call it upsampling from 5.1 to 7.1, but with DTS 5.1 this is standard practice to repeat the surround signal to the extra rear surrounds anyways. Except the Era 300 does not do that either. That also explains while the surround level slider in the app only affects the outward facing tweeter. In short, non-ATMOS surround playback with the Era 300 is like using the Sonos One’s (also 1 active tweeter only) being angled away from your listening position. I really hope there will be a firmware fix or option to make the Era 300 more usable for non-ATMOS content in a surround set-up.

100% agree with this. We should have the ability to turn the center forward facing tweeter back on when they are installed is rear speakers, in a  surround sound set up.

Not making excuses ….but I’ve got to believe that Sonos engineers are aware of the Center channel going silent in some scenarios. It could possibly be by design but Sonos isn’t going to spill the beans as to why (at least not yet).

Sometimes products are released knowing there is a potential customer feature dissatisfaction on the horizon; but move forward with the release to start recouping R&D costs. Publicly traded compnaies are always under pressure to show a respectable ROI on a product release ASAP. The intent is to address the issue via a software/firmware update. 

IF however, Sonos was not aware of the center speaker going silent and there’s no logical reason it should ...then the Sonos engineering group dropped the ball BIG TIME.

IF no explanation is given for the Era 300 center channel behavior “pro or con” it could be Sonos’ biggest launch failure. The Era 300 could be a “lame-duck” with no future; as sales could be negatively impacted just for lack of information.

IF the center channel behavior is a design flaw that can’t be fixed via an update then Sonos IMO should start a recall sooner than later to minimize brand confidence loss.