First of all - I am a 10+ years die hard Sonos ambassador - I just love Sonos products in everyway.
I’m also an life long enthusiast of full speaker Hi-Fi and surround sound, and have many various setups including a full speaker, amp, sub setup as well as a Sonos Playbase 5.1 setup. The Playbase is really good, but can’t really win against my full featured Hi-Fi speaker/sub setup - and its also limited by missing HDMI ARC, etc.
So when the Sonos Arc was announced my hopes was high and I ordered it right away.
I quickly got i running and Trueplayed it. The first movie impressions was quite okay, however not really great. But the music listening was absolutely horrible - I could not believe how bad the sound was. Even my old Play 1 would beat it any day. So I tried tuning again, etc. but nothing helped.
Looking around for solutions I stumbled upon the suggestion to Trueplay with and old iPad. I had Trueplayed tuned the setup with my iPhone XS which is said to have a filter for high treble impacting the Trueplay.
So there I was walking around Trueplay tuning with my old iPad Air 2… and here comes the point:
The difference is absolutely insane. The music listening has gone from horrible to outstanding. The Arc now fully lives up to the expectations and the price. The Home Cinema experience is lifted greatly as well, greatly outmatching my old Playbase setup and quite closely matching my full speaker setup. Correctly Trueplayed, the Arc is an absolutely outstanding soundbar.
It seems many, many people have this experience. So I hope that somebody at Sonos are listening carefully in on these inputs and finds a permanent solution for everyone to fix this. Probably many are not aware and thus are by mistake disliking their new Arc.