How many years till sonos fixes the loud pop and shutdown with Atmos???

Exchanged my Arc because of this. Sonos technical team are very well aware of the issue. It’s a combination of AppleTV 4K 2nd and 3rd Gen / XBox and the Sonos Arc. The Arc isn’t handling the Atmos content correctly from those devices.

Sonos stupid workaround is to turn off Atmos. However turning of eArc for me is working currently. 

That doesn’t make a lot of sense, from my meager knowledge. The Atmos source is passed the the TV. The TV parses the data on its onboard electronics, and reflects it out via the ARC port to the Sonos Arc. In the grand scheme of things, there’s no direct connection between the Sonos and any particular source device, the Sonos is merely connected to the processing unit in the TV. That suggests that there’s something odd being sent by the source, which the TV isn’t able to handle properly, and is consequently being passed on to the Sonos to play…

It begs the question, what is different about the Apple TV’s and Microsoft’s XBox implementation of Atmos? Or is it that they’ve done a standard implementation of Atmos, and some TV manufacturers have done something different? Perhaps merely an older version, and not a bugged implementation?

Wish I could reproduce this, but I don’t seem to have this issue on my HD Fury Arcana.

I think the difference is that, at least for Apple TV, it is using Dolby MAT format. I expect playing a 4K Bluray on Xbox would work fine because that wouldn’t use MAT format but games and apps on Xbox might use MAT format.

Apologies I was getting mixed up eArc not the issue. Only disabling Atmos on the ATV sorts the problem out. 
 

so frustrating 

No apology necessary, at least from my side.

I’m working from a “this makes sense to me” aspect, which, at least in this case, lays the responsibility somewhere other than Sonos….which I assume is why they haven’t issued a “fix”, since they can’t, it’s something in the source that they’re receiving from elsewhere upstream. 

But I could certainly be wrong, and there is always a chance that it is really a Sonos issue. That would be surprising to me, but I can’t completely discount the possibility. 

It is frustrating, to be sure, because there’s so many things in the mix of this problem. From Dolby MAT to Apple TV/Microsoft XBox to the TV’s CEC/ARC component, to the Sonos as a fairly dumb “receiver of data”. 

But that’s all my impression. I don’t have a lab in which to test any of this to point the finger at one part of that chain, merely what I consider to be “logic”. 

Has anyone tested the Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen with this issue yet? Thinking about picking one up today or tomorrow to see if the issue exists with that combination of hardware

Confirmed that the issue still exists with an Apple TV 4K via a Sony X90CH eArc to a Beam Gen 2. Random pops with Atmos content that shuts  off the Beam.

PS: The same Atmos content played from the built in Sony app does not have this issue. Makes me think that is an Apple TV Atmos decoding issue?

Apple TV utilized Dolby MAT format, it seems that is the cause 

Yeah, I and many others get the pop from both Apple TV and Xbox. Those two have in common that they use Dolby MAT. Sonos Arc originally shipped without support for MAT and is now producing these pops. Must be something hard for Sonos software/firmware to handle. 
 

Two things:

1. Thanks for confirming that Beam also has this bug. So far we’ve mostly had Arc reports. 
2. Please note that when your Beam stops playing sound and requires a reboot, it is not technically off or shut down. If you mention that your Beam turns off, Sonos support will make it seem like you have a special unrelated problem as opposed to the issue that hundreds(?) of us are reporting. 

Note that the Sonos Staff have openly acknowledged their awareness of the issue. It seems this does also affect other brands/makes of speakers too.. see here from a post earlier in this thread:

I do have the Arc and Sonos Beam, but don’t have an XBox, or Apple TV 4K …and all I can say is I’ve never encountered the ‘popping’ issue. I do have the older Apple TV 4HD and that’s been fine with Dolby Mat, but that older device doesn’t have Atmos (obviously) - so it seems to me to be related to the Atmos codec/metadata when encapsulated in uncompressed Dolby MAT format over eARC.

I suspect this is likely out of Sonos’ hands to therefore resolve, but whether it’s a Dolby issue, problems with the eARC standard, or the way that Dolby MAT is implemented on the Apple TV, Xbox, or other devices, it’s actual cause (still) remains outside of the public domain. 

What I’m not understanding here though, as an outsider looking in, is it not possible to switch off Dolby MAT on these peripheral products and use DD+ (plus) compressed Atmos instead? ..if not, then maybe just get a Nvidia Shield, or Fire TV etc; as they have no issues with either the Arc or Beam here …and DD+ Atmos does sound pretty damn good too on each of my Sonos HT setups.. plus there are Holidays Sales on right now on those type of products.

If everyone moved on from the issues encountered (if they can afford to take that step), I’m sure the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Dolby or whoever is responsible, would then be firmly pushed into resolving these issues perhaps a little more quickly.