Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss

I have had this happening for the last month. Getting a little old. I love the Arc but may have to hook up the Beam Gen 2 if this problem persists or drop Sonos all together and move on.

I’m having the exact same issues described in this thread - loud short and sharp bang followed by loss of audio. I have an Arc, Sub Gen 3, and two One SL’s as surrounds. It has happened for me a number of times over about a year, but only when using an Xbox (currently Series X, but also happened on Xbox One S previously). I have an LG TV (CX55) connected through eARC connection to the Arc. Is there a fix or workaround for this yet? Also is there a way to accurately run a diagnostic test to ensure that no damage has been caused to the Arc’s speakers etc? Thanks for your help 

Sorry to hear you’re affected. The workarounds that work for some: try turning off CEC or Dolby Vision. If that doesn’t work, you have to turn off Atmos. 
 

Sonos says that Sonos Pop does not harm the speakers.

Just wanted to post here that I was researching some info on beam vs arc, and then stumbled onto this thread. I will postpone buying anything Sonos, and it looks like this thing reached escape velocity in internetland and is about to turn into a significant PR issue.

Would be great to have this resolved. ARC popping on the Xbox series x, Lg C2 is becoming more frequent. I think. 

Yo he vendido ya mi SONOS Beam 2 , se acabo la espera

he adquirido otra marca que este mas atenta a los errores de sus productos 

Experienced that "pop" for the first time last night playing FIFA23 on my XBox X...An hour later had my second experience... All seemed to be normal after I repowered the ARC

Hi all,

Experienced this a while ago, it frightened me and my cats so much I immediately turned of HDMI-CEC on the Xbox Series X.
 

Didn’t happen again until yesterday when launching Starfield for the first time, I had a series of loud pops over about 30 seconds, the cats ran out of the house in shock! It settled while playing, though it happened again on quick resuming Starfield after about an hour off. The cats went again and they’d only just returned to the house. Suffice to say they are very suspicious of the Sonos Arc now. 

A possible solution to this Arc pop problem for some or maybe many?

No AppleTV or Xbox involved but this solved the “Arc pop and then no sound” for me.

Yesterday, hooked up brand new set of Arc with two 300s as surrounds: ethernet-connected Arc and 300s wifi connected. Did not go through the full setup steps but simply used the S2 app to get them grouped together as Arc + Surround in “one room” and played some music & television, saving steps like Trueplay for later due to some noise in the environment that could not be cleared for a few hours. All sounded great for those couple of hours.

Connection was over HDMI eArc from a television. User uses apps on a mid-brand smart TV to watch streaming content. Not knowing about this thread, I went into the TV menus to be sure eARC was “on” and spatial audio was “on” in the S2 app. Again, all sounded great. 

Then, as a potential last step in the basic setup process when the environmental noise was quieted, I ran Trueplay. I’ve done this on other Sonos systems and never had any issue. However, immediately after completing Trueplay, the ARC made the pop-pop-pop sounds described in this thread whether playing Sonos Radio music or watching anything on TV. Light would flash orange. Sound would completely cease on Arc but still play in the two 300s. So Arc wasn’t dead, but seemingly in duress or potentially damaged.

I didn’t know this was widespread issue, so I did the obvious thing: unplug Arc, wait about 2 minutes, plug it back in. Pop-pop-pop. I tried this a couple of times with more time unplugged but all efforts led back to Pops and then either low sound or no sound performance of Arc (but still normal sound from the 300s). 

The whole setup had been purchased from a local retailer and time to close was approaching fast. Without the time to discover a thread like this or even seek help from Sonos Customer Service, we assumed speaker blew and tried to go swap it for another Arc. Store was closed, so the exchange got delayed to today. 

Last night, looking for any other solution, I found this thread (and many others) and was very disappointed to see how widespread the problem appears to be… and that it is getting blamed on AppleTV & Xbox (neither applying in this setup) and/or getting remedy advice like turn off CEC and/or Spatial. Digesting all of that, I thought through cause & effect: what did I do just before the popping started? Trueplay setup. All was fine for maybe 2 hours before that step.

So before swapping, I decided to turn off Trueplay in S2 app and give it another try: Pop-Pop-Pop. So then I unplugged Arc, waited a few minutes, reset to factory, and then added it back to the system to get it and 300s connected again. 

Put on some music and all sounded great. Left it playing for a couple of hours just in case perhaps temps/time had something to do with this problem. Nope. Tried television with eArc “on” and spatial “on” in the app: all just fine. Did some manual fine tuning in EQ, loudness of surrounds, height volume, bass & treble etc (things I would expect Trueplay to do) and then more testing, including with spatial audio. All just fine. It sounds as great as some of us know Arc and surrounds can sound. 

It’s been playing all day- mixes of music and television- with no issues. All other variables are as they were when I was getting the “Pop” issue EXCEPT- and this is key- this time I didn’t run Trueplay at all. 

While just a single case scenario, this makes me suspect that Trueplay is a good candidate to be the source of the issue. In the step-by-step setup process in S2, Trueplay is just one of the steps. I suspect many people just execute the steps. If so- if they just run Trueplay as recommended- perhaps that’s what triggers the issue?

I’ve had my own Arc + Move set for a few years and have Trueplayed it several times with no “pops.” I was tempted to run Trueplay again on this new setup to see if this hypothesis would repeat but I didn’t want to “mess it up” if that single variable was the cause (as it strongly seems to me through this- albeit- single sample).

If some of you got the “pops” issues AFTER running Trueplay, consider testing this hypothesis by resetting the popping speaker to factory, setting it back up again, but BYPASSING the Trueplay step. Maybe you’ll either just be lucky as this one may have been for me or maybe this will narrow this issue in on running Trueplay… which would give Sonos a more specific area on which to focus than apparently thinking the issue is OUTSIDE of Sonos products. 

Perhaps this has already been discovered and disproved earlier in the 42 pages of this or other threads- I didn’t read it all- but I share all this to hopefully help some of you who might just follow the recommended steps and thus crash into this problem. If some of you “fix” it by this method, let Sonos know and perhaps they can pound through the Trueplay code to find what may be the bug(s) that may be driving this issue for some or many (or maybe all???) of us. It’s easy enough to try.

I hope this helps some of you. I’m glad it did the trick for this new system.

Certainly is an interesting angle to come from.  Couple of questions though.  When you got the pop-pop-pop.  I’m assuming it was one pop at a time but was it a gunshot type blast?  Did you by chance have a chance to look into the app to see what audio codec you were using when the pop happened?  Reason I ask is that you say it also happened when you were watching TV.  I don’t know if any TV service today that encodes Dolby MAT Atmos in their feed so I’m assuming that you were either DD+ or 5.1

If that’s the case, I am curious if it is the same Atmos pop that this thread has experienced.  None the less, I will try the theory because enough things from your experience resonated for me

Thanks