lowest volume in 16.1 and reducing bass

Agreed.. Sonos corporate mafia seems to have lowered the volume..again. It’s not what it used to be..aggravating to say the least !

There have been persistent complaints from some users that Volume step ‘1’ was too loud in their nighttime environment. Evidently, SONOS has decreased the Volume step size such that there are now multiple steps between the former ‘0’ (muted) and ‘1’. This gives nighttime users more control.

Unfortunately, this runs afoul for other users who equate the ‘power’ of a unit with their top listening number. To these users a lower number at their top output implies a more powerful unit. Because the shift near zero results in a higher required number at their regular listening level, these users are certain that some power has been stolen from them — when, in fact, the output energy is as loud as before (with the old number) and ‘100’ would result in the same output level as the prior ‘100’.

In previous eras the “power” of a unit was sometimes interpreted as the position of the Volume control. If a unit got very loud with a slight rotation of the Volume control, it was deemed to be a ‘powerful’ unit, but in my experience next to impossible to control at low listening levels. Low end units would make sure that they became ‘loud’ at small control rotations. If I hung out in the low end section of a mass market store these aggressive volume control units would be accepted as ‘powerful’ while a higher end unit might be rejected as not being powerful if its Volume control needed to be rotated farther for an equivalent output — when the higher end unit was actually much more powerful. The low end units often reached their maximum Volume at ten’o’clock, while the more powerful units would continue getting louder.

For me the number is simply a reference that I can use for setting the output level to the same as yesterday. If SONOS shifts the scale, I’ll be annoyed a bit on day one, but the old numbers will soon be forgotten.

Doesn’t seem ‘majorly broken’ to me, and is functioning as it did before. I wonder what is different about  our systems, that there is such a wide discrepancy between our experiences. 

I, too, have been a Sonos user for over 20 years, but have not been experiencing any of these issues on my S2 16.1 system. So why are we experiencing such different scenarios? 

Were I you, I would submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this various problems, and call Sonos Support to discuss it.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

And, as an additional thought, there certainly is a thread around here that talks about the potential need to reset the Apple TV remote, although it’s something I’ve not needed to do myself. Since you’re using Atmos, that suggests at least a Sonos Arc, and either an ARC or eARC connection, which implies the system is receiving volume control information from the Apple TV, passed to the TV set, and on to the Sonos.