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ChrisHolzer
Contributor I
April 18, 2025
Answered

(Feature Request) Arc Ultra - needs volume control for center channel

Right now I almost regrett to have moved to a Sonos ARC Ultra + Sub + 2xERA300 setup as the center channel of the Arc Ultra overpowers the left and right channels which means that you have almost no directional stereo effect from the front.

The center channel is at least 5bB louder than the left an right channels, you can notice this easiely by playing a surround sound test video which you would usually use to finetune the channel volumes when using an AVR.

We need an option to change the center channel volume of the Arc Ultra to actually hear the left and right channels.

Trueplaytuning does not change the current behaviour, speech enhancement makes it worse.

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    Jamie A
    Jamie AAnswer
    Sonos Staff
    April 18, 2025

    Hi ​@ChrisHolzer,

    I’m sorry to hear that you’re not happy with the Arc Ultra.

    Having individual channel control has been requested before for our Home Theater setups, though due to the channels being virtualized and not being a one-to-one mapping, it makes this feature a lot harder to implement. 

    I’ll pass this along to the relevant teams as a feature request, but I can’t provide any ETA on when or if this will be implemented. If you have any other requests or suggestions, please feel free to share them here or in another thread on the community. 

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    4 replies

    Jamie A
    Jamie AAnswer
    Sonos Staff
    April 18, 2025

    Hi ​@ChrisHolzer,

    I’m sorry to hear that you’re not happy with the Arc Ultra.

    Having individual channel control has been requested before for our Home Theater setups, though due to the channels being virtualized and not being a one-to-one mapping, it makes this feature a lot harder to implement. 

    I’ll pass this along to the relevant teams as a feature request, but I can’t provide any ETA on when or if this will be implemented. If you have any other requests or suggestions, please feel free to share them here or in another thread on the community. 

      MarkJnf
      Lyricist III
      April 21, 2025

      Agree.

      we need that.

        ChrisHolzerAuthor
        Contributor I
        April 23, 2025

        Having individual channel control has been requested before for our Home Theater setups, though due to the channels being virtualized and not being a one-to-one mapping, it makes this feature a lot harder to implement. 

         

        Thank you for your reply, I understand and maybe I should rephrase my request.

        Right now with the center channel overpowering the left and right channel, the soundstage infront sounds very narrow.

        Since as you correctly noted the ARC ultra virtualizes the channels, a single slider to adjust how wide the front soundstage is, might be a better suggestion as that is more in line with the product and audio processing logic, than implementing indivdual FL-C-FR volume sliders.
        In the end that single slider would achive the same desired result. :)

          GuyinPA75
          Enthusiast I
          May 2, 2025

          Hi ​@ChrisHolzer,

          I’m sorry to hear that you’re not happy with the Arc Ultra.

          Having individual channel control has been requested before for our Home Theater setups, though due to the channels being virtualized and not being a one-to-one mapping, it makes this feature a lot harder to implement. 

          I’ll pass this along to the relevant teams as a feature request, but I can’t provide any ETA on when or if this will be implemented. If you have any other requests or suggestions, please feel free to share them here or in another thread on the community. 

           

          We understand the “design” choice with the hardware.

          Yet, I would like to think it should be easy to add a slider to the options and it be greatly appreciated and go long, long, way for customers to have much better experience. This slider option is incredibly needed.

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