Contributor I

Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
December 8, 2020
1202 replies
90688 views

I was playing on my Xbox when the arc suddenly made an extremely loud pop sound and then lost audio completely. The app wouldn’t let me adjust the volume and Alexa wake up didn’t emit its usual tone. I had to remove the power from the arc and reapply which resumed the audio. I’m concerned that one of the speakers in the arc may have been damaged when this happened. Has anyone had this issue?

We have had no issues with the arc since purchasing it earlier this year.

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Pinned Reply By Corry P

Hi Everyone!

Good news! We are pleased to share that our team has identified a fix for the popping sound on Arc and it will be shipped to all customers as part of a software release today, Thursday Nov 16 at 09:30 ET, 14:30 GMT, 15:30 CET. Please note that some app stores may take an extra hour or two for it to become available.

During our investigation we uncovered a rare bug that impacts how Sonos Arc and Beam (Gen 2) in certain home theater configurations process Dolby MAT, a streaming technology which is used to deliver Dolby Atmos audio over HDMI. Occasionally a Sonos product will receive a corrupted audio segment from an external source and needs to filter out unwanted audio data. The bug we identified was allowing our Dolby decoder to play audible errors on certain home theater setups rather than concealing them. The solution we’ve built and tested improves our Dolby decoder so it better filters out corrupt audio data that can manifest as a popping sound. We’ll continue to monitor customer feedback closely after the fix has been released and ship additional updates if necessary.

We strive to deliver the best listening experience possible and work to address major issues that impact our customers. We apologize for the disruption this bug has caused and want to thank you for your patience while our team developed a fix.

We would also like to thank our community users for their detailed setup information and steps to reproduce the issue, which were helpful to us in uncovering the cause of the bug.

Show previous replies

jamie_shaw

Enthusiast I

Out of curiosity, when you receive Atmos audio through from the Roku, what format/codec is it in – listed as “Audio in” under the Arc in “About my System”. Should be “Dolby Atmos (TrueHD)”, “Dolby Atmos (DD+)”, or just “Dolby Atmos”.

Audio In for the Arc just shows “Dolby Atmos”.

Thanks for confirming — I thought that might be the case. Just “Dolby Atmos” is that it’s using “Dolby MAT”, the same as Apple TV and Xbox Series X.

There’s definitely been some software upgrade to Arc that has introduced issues when Arc is decoding Dolby MAT with Atmos content.

M

mrchris76

Lyricist III

Hi,

I have the same loud pop issue with Arc, Sub, AMP (for surround speakers), Sony TV X91J and Apple 4K (2nd Gen). The loud pop only happens in Atmos mode. If I set Apple TV to change format to Dolby 5.1 then the loud pop doesn’t happen. I’m wondering if anyone has heard from Sonos regarding solutions or possible ETA for fix.

Not sure if it was this thread or another but someone mentioned that a fix was in the current beta builds, apparently.

Not sure if Sonos have confirmed the issue at all, but it’s clearly becoming more widespread. 😕

Yes I mentioned. When I logged a support call with Sonos they did the remote diagnostics thing and said they saw some ‘high frequencies on the atmos feed’ or something to that effect. I was told that there is a fix being tested now in beta firmware, but given no ETA on when to expect. So by that I took it as acknowledgement of the problem.

Would be nice to turn on Atmos on my xbox one series x again! Thankfully not had this happen for me on Apple TV 4K Atmos content… yet.

Y

Young80i

Lyricist I

It happen to me couple time and it just happen right now watching Disney+ on Dolby Atmos.. please get this fix with a update or something!

J

jrh9765

Lyricist II

So now finally after a year of the multiple threads and call to techs/ diagnostic reports they are finally working on it?!?! This has honestly been a known issue for over a year... How is this now just being worked on...

L

LuiG

Enthusiast I

I’ve had the Sonos Arc since October and safe to say I’ve had this popping issue happen to me on multiple occasions at this point. I thought it was an issue with my Xbox Series X but seeing that people are having similar issues on the Apple TV makes it seem that this is definitely a Sonos issue. Hopefully that fix comes out sooner rather than later.

A

acestech

Lyricist I

First off thanks for this thread. I have a small integration company that sells a lot of Sonos hardware. We currently have a client that has one television with this behavior of a loud pop from his ARC that stops playing (upstream is Sony 85” 91J series and AppleTV). The issue seems to manifest itself when streaming Disney+ presumably with Atmos content.

We’ve had the “luxury” of trying two different ARC speakers on this set up (as was suggested to us from our dealer tech support) and the issue remains. Our next step is to try streaming Disney+ directly from the Sony rather than the AppleTV will keep you posted.

Airgetlam

I’m of the apparently minority opinion that the ‘pop’ is being generated upstream from the Sonos device, and the Sonos device is merely playing what it is handed. That being said, I’ve seen no compelling evidence in particular, other than it appears to be associated with Apple TV and Microsoft XBoxes.

Bruce

Ken_Griffiths

I’m of the apparently minority opinion that the ‘pop’ is being generated upstream from the Sonos device, and the Sonos device is merely playing what it is handed. That being said, I’ve seen no compelling evidence in particular, other than it appears to be associated with Apple TV and Microsoft XBoxes.

The XBox does seem to be particularly prone to the "popping" issue (and it’s not always Sonos related). Here are just a few (of several) links that I came across in a quick browser search:

jamie_shaw

Enthusiast I

I’m of the apparently minority opinion that the ‘pop’ is being generated upstream from the Sonos device, and the Sonos device is merely playing what it is handed. That being said, I’ve seen no compelling evidence in particular, other than it appears to be associated with Apple TV and Microsoft XBoxes.

I’m with you on this.

I had the same setup since November 2020 and had zero issue until November 2021, around which time Sony updated the X90H to Android 11, Sonos introduced DTS and Apple released tvOS 15 — one of these software releases has to be the culprit.

I was under the impression it was tvOS at first, as it seemed to be around when tvOS 15 was released.

I’m still plugging my Dolby MAT theory, especially now it seems the Roku Ultra is having issues to, which also outputs Atmos as Dolby MAT.

G

gson

Contributor I

I’m of the apparently minority opinion that the ‘pop’ is being generated upstream from the Sonos device, and the Sonos device is merely playing what it is handed. That being said, I’ve seen no compelling evidence in particular, other than it appears to be associated with Apple TV and Microsoft XBoxes.

Happens with my Roku Ultra as well. It has now happened to me 3 or four times in the last few weeks. Very annoying and I hope Sonos fixes the issue soon.

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