Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss

I’m asking if it’s really a fix it it would happen again. I wouldn’t say it is. 
 

For the record I’ve tried this in the past and the bang always came back quickly. That’s what I’m basing my experience off of. If it helps solve your bang I’m happy for you. 😎

It’s not a guarantee fix until sonos fixes this issue on their end . But by using this method at least for now I can ensure myself the POP is not gonna happen and scare myself to death 

Tom’s Guide article is up:

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/sonos-arc-has-a-dolby-atmos-problem-what-you-need-to-know

So for now, proceed with caution before buying a Sonos Arc soundbar. Again, we had no issues in our testing, and Sonos claims the issue is limited to a small number of customers, but there’s no way to guarantee that your Arc soundbar wouldn’t develop this issue — possibly after it's too late to return the soundbar. Which is a shame, because when the Arc works, it’s a great soundbar.

Happy 1,000 posts everyone!

@Airgetlam and @Ken_Griffiths : I haven’t heard from you in this thread for a while. I’m super curious:

How do you view the Sonos Pop finally getting media coverage?

I assume you mean the Verge coverage? If so, then yes it was helpful to read the summary and that Sonos are continuing to work on trying to reproduce and (hopefully) fix the issue, but it seems there’s no announcement just yet, I guess🤷‍♂️.

It’s still not clear where the problems actually lie, if it’s certain hardware/TV’s, or software etc. I still think the Atmos metadata moving out of sync from the audio stream, as being one plausible possibility, but here’s hoping the matter can get resolved soon for you and the others here that may encounter this issue. 🤞

Yeah, I should have specified. I meant The Verge, Ars Technics, and Tom’s Guide.

I wonder if it will hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, or if it’s too in-the-weeds for that.

It’s great that there’s coverage, but I’d love to see others than Sonos looking in to it. My current fear is it’s a failure of CEC handling format changes in a MAT container, and the result is that Sonos (and other audio sinks) are just playing what they’re being handed by eARC as part of CEC. Always easiest to lay the blame on the last device, but figuring out whether or not that ‘blame’ deserves to be there or not is a question as yet unanswered. Nor have I investigated the user agreement when companies implement standards such as CEC with sub specifications such as ARC and eARC. It’s possible, in my mind, that there is a legal clause there that says ‘you can feed us back data for us to look at and ‘fix’ , but you can not publicly point fingers’ or some such. 

Which of course raises the issue of ‘if it is a failure in CEC’s handling of format changes in a MAT container’, how do all of these TVs get updated with newer, more robust versions. And when?

Step 1 is identifying the issue, and where it lies. Hopefully this community has provided enough detail to assist in that. Where it goes from there really depends on where the issue really lies. If it was Sonos, I’d honestly would have expected a quicker ‘fix’ to be released. Since that hasn’t happened (yet), it makes me wonder how far up the chain it goes, how complex the issue really is, and who is ultimately going to be responsible for fixing it. 

@tomwarren While I appreciate your article and hope it helps bring more attention to this problem, I wonder why it is written as if Sonos Apple and XBox are the only brands with such problems. The internet is full of reports of people having problems with the Apple TV4k, especially the 3rd generation, but also with other external devices (PS5, Switch etc.) and with many different AV manufacturers and soundbar brands (Samsung, Bose etc.).

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254099712?answerId=258137714022&page=8

Mabye it would help to get a statement from other manufacturers like Apple as well?

II do not know what should be so difficult to reliably reproduce the problem. Can’t they just send the devices to each other? I do not know who is to blame and who can solve it (if possible at all). Imho disabling eARC is the way to go for now.

FWIW, I think Tom made exactly the right call in his presentation. Apple TV and Xbox are the major consumer devices that are affected by the Sonos Pop at the moment. PS5 probably will be, but that’s only on beta firmware, so too soon to report. I expect additional coverage in the tech press if that beta software goes production and users start experiencing the pop. There are a lot more PS5 out there than Xbox and Apple TV. 
 

On the TV brand side, we have at a minimum lots of Samsung, Sony, and LG users affected. So that’s basically everyone. 
 

And then on the soundbar side, only Sonos Arc and Beam 2 make the Sonos Pop. Yes, there can be problems with other soundbars, such as crackling, rhythmic clicking, etc where users may use the word “pop” to the describe the issue. But a gunshot-like sound followed by audio drop out on the soundbar while the surrounds keep playing? That’s totally unique to Sonos. 

I haven’t experienced the issue. I suspect that SONOS licensed a chipset and decoder software that are included in ARC and other manufacturers using the chipset or decoder are at risk too. This would explain why a few other devices are experiencing the ‘POP’. The pop could be some sort of software overrun or perhaps a variable (from chip to chip) sensitivity to voltage or temperature and AMP’s environment is at an edge.

Since I cannot observe the issue, is there any dependency on the movie? For example, if you replay a ‘POP’ movie, does the event tend to repeat? Does it repeat at the same spot? Does one movie tend to predispose a following movie to ‘POP’?

 It would help if ‘POP’ victims kept good logs. The log should be verbose, keeping track of time of day, temperature, play time into the movie, ARC Volume setting, etc. It would be best to submit a diagnostic and include the confirmation number in the log. If you are regularly hit with these events, the developers could be able to provide special builds and access to enhanced diagnostic procedures.

Everyone should keep an open mind. Once you decide that the problem must be […] or cannot be […], you are likely to be blindsided. One should not assume that there is a single cause. It’s possible that a string of events must occur in a certain order before there is a ‘POP’. This is why logging is important.