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.
The two Home Theater Control settings for Apple TV and then the one master on/off for CEC on Xbox.
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.
Hi
Just got the email. I’m looking forward to working with your tech.
had this happen to me for the first time last night, did it three times, honestly thought the speaker had blown electrically… what a noise, like a shotgun going off, then no sound at all.
after searching online about it i found this forum, and by the looks of it, this has been an issue for some time now.
I was running my signal from a xboxone x, in dolby atmos to a Hdfury which splits signal to the tv and Sonos Arc, since disabling atmos and forcing the xbox to output 7.1 instead it hasn’t happened again.
The bang was definitely from my Arc, not the SL surrounds or the sub.
Hope they find a fix for it, an Atmos speaker that wont play Atmos..
Yesterday. Was watching Long Way Up ( a road show with no special effects) on Apple TV and all of a sudden, it felt like something exploded in my family room. First I thought the chimney had crashed into my fire place seriously then my wife pointed it out that it was the Arc. The same thing happened today when I began to watch Mad Max - Fury Road just when the movie began.
Started happening after 14.19.1 update. I replayed the same scenes again when the arc made the exploding sound and couldn’t reproduce.
Everything below is less than a month old which makes up my family room.
LG C2 OLED 55 TV, Apple TV 4K (2022), Sonos Arc, 2 Subs Gen 3 & Gen 2, SL’s as surround.
My bedroom is set up with Beam-2, Apple TV 4K (2022) Sub Mini and SL’s as rear. NO ISSUES HERE.
Welcome to the club. Nice meeting you. You have an awesome and expensive set up. From what we’ve all been told by Sonos support your Arc is not damaged even though the pop was incredibly scary and loud. We’ve all been there. But that’s where the Sonos involvement kind of stops. You will find here a lot of Sonos’ premier customers discussing the serious issue of not being able to play Dolby Atmos on their premier Dolby Atmos product, the Sonos Arc. You’ll also find lot of incredible in depth good faith troubleshooting by many great Sonos customers. Even more discussion about whether it’s the fault of Sonos, the TV manufacturers, Apple or Microsoft. Unfortunately that’s about it. We all ask for Sonos updates from time to time but get none. The recommended solution is to turn off Dolby Atmos on your Apple TV. We all hope one day Sonos will take us more seriously, show us some respect and update us on any progress.
Bruce,
It doesn't have to be 24/7 support; when did I say that? I run a business and we offer email/ticket support. The idea is pretty simple, send an email to our support, we pick it up in office hours. It gives the customer opportunity to reply when they like, it's not rocket science. I guess Bruce, you have never run a customer focused business or business which demands your time Monday to Friday 7am - 19.00pm? I can't sit on a phone to support, I'm running a business and I guess most people would be at work during these hours?! Giving customers a chat bot which can't even generate a support email is really lame.
Sure would be nice to hear an official statement from Sonos on this. It’s the bare minimum that I would expect from such a high end audio product
We all know these boards are monitored, so the fact that people continue to have problems with so Sonos intervention or guidance is really sad. The problem will not go away on its own
Also experiencing this issue with my Apple TV. New OS came out for ATV and it’s still happening. Anyone have a fix for it aside from turning off atmos?
The official line from Sonos for its premier Dolby Atmos $900 Arc soundbar is to turn off Dolby Atmos.
Hi,
Must admit a bit disappointed with this response. I don’t consider a loud electrical bang followed by complete audio loss a sound quality issue. I consider it a product failure.
just had the problem happen again.
In addition as an intermittent problem I am not sure how I am expected to film a one off failure event when I don’t know when it will happen and it happens over the course of a second. To clarify after the bang the unit is silent until power cycled.
Tried ringing support, on hold for ages, no reply so rang John lewis as I was within return period and have exchanged for a new unit. Not sure if this will help but clear Sonos themselves are not interested just like the audio drop out issue.
Really disappointed with Sonos when it comes to the ARC as there are clearly issues that they are refusing to acknowledge as systemic faults with the product. The xbox issue and drop outs have numerous posts so clearly not an isolated problem.
I will be contacting the review sites to make them aware of this new issue in addition to the audio drop out.
I still suspect a hardware issue that will/has been fixed with new units while they hope existing owners suffer or wait until out of exchange periods.
My DV comment wasn’t aimed at you. Earlier in the discussion there was a recommendation to turn off DV on the Xbox. Turning off DV seems to help on Apple TV, but not on Xbox.
I’m about to go in a 4-day trip, which is terrible timing because I would love to help you replicate your result. If you’re willing to spend the time, I think it would be super helpful for you to try to return to a state where the pop happens. That would give us a lot of information about:
If you can find a setting where you can make the pop disappear and reappear, you’ve won and solved this! If it’s now gone for good on the other hand, it might reappear and there’s something really complex going on.
Diagnostic 427286041
Just tried again after the tvOS 16.3 update that supposedly improved Atmos. Still loud bang and audio gone. It REALLY sucks because when I turned Atmos on for the first time in almost a year it sounded so good...and then I was reminded why I had to turn it off 🤬
I am also here to report the pop 🤦♂️. New sonos user. Sony xf900 with arc, sub,1’s for surrounds. Xbox user. Popping has got really bad. Multiple times a session. I had to change audio to 5.1 because it doesn’t happen with that setting. Boo sonos! This issue should be resolved, this thread was created 2 years ago!
Does this damage the speaker at all? I believe the Sonos rep has said they haven’t seen any indications that it does, but Rios said that it does?
Clarification, Sonos reps are not technicians. Neither am I. My theory (which is all it is) is based off of my experience as a Quality Assurance Tester for a hardware and software company.
I am alluding to the fact that there has been zero update, fix, acknowledgment or announcement of this known issue that is 2 years old. And no software update to address this issue.
And when I’ve stated multiple times over how I and many others are able to play Dolby Atmos on the Sonos Arc as long as Dolby Vision is disabled from all sources. After the popping error has occurred.
Meaning, there is nothing wrong with the actual speakers. I have previously stated that it MIGHT be a component that is “fried” and is no longer able to process the signal.
My posts are long to specify exactly what I mentioned to avoid confusion or misinterpretation.
Anything we say as customers are speculation. The purpose of this thread is to help us the customer understand the issue and whether or not this issue has been or will be addressed by Sonos.
We all know the answer to this.
I tend to agree with this view. They were aware of it when I reported the issue a week ago. It is a bit of a concern that they have an Atmos product out there that cannot reliably play this format. It seems there are a number of different configurations/sources that I think eliminate anything upstream of the ARC.
I hadn't experienced this before as my previous TV only had ARC and not EARC so could not pass lossless atmos. It surprised me how long this issue has been going and I wonder how many others have not experienced it due to their TV not being able to pass through a full Atmos signal.
I can now confirm that his problem is TV Independent. I just had this problem on my new LG C1 whereas before I was experiencing it on the Sony X900h
I’m wondering if there any common denominator devices connected to the TV, such as the Xbox or Apple TV - I’ve seen those mentioned in some of the posts here and elsewhere online, with different Soundbars too, having this same issue?
There is, devices that use the Dolby MAT container for Atmos (Xbox, Apple TV and now Roku). There was some debate before as to whether the TV passing through the MAT signal was doing it properly and since I’ve had failure with two different TVs now. I’m more confident it has nothing to do with the TV passing through the signal but the signal itself
It is my understanding that we have users in this thread who have the pop but have never had an Xbox connected.
These were some of the links where other manufacturers had the popping issue…(I haven’t tested if they’re still valid)…
I cannot find anything recent that relates to this particular issue with other soundbars. The latest one (2 years ago) relates to a JBL soundbar. I cannot see any mention anywhere of other premium soundbars having this kind of issue.
A lot of those reports talk about popping/crackling noise whereas the Sonos is a loud bang - probably the term popping is not the right description in this case.
I had the same issue last night, twice whilst mid stream on Netflix. I reported through support and was provided with a reference. I have got a new TV with Atmos/EARC capability.
I have been advised to turn off Atmos which defeats the point of paying a significant amount of money for this functionality and not being able to use it.
I was surprised reading the comments on here as to how long this had been going on for.
I submitted a diagnostic report last night and spoke to support, they acknowledged the issue exists for many and they have a team gathering info to work on a resolution, I provided details of the different TVs and devices I’ve experienced the issue on
I tend to agree with this view. They were aware of it when I reported the issue a week ago. It is a bit of a concern that they have an Atmos product out there that cannot reliably play this format. It seems there are a number of different configurations/sources that I think eliminate anything upstream of the ARC.
I hadn't experienced this before as my previous TV only had ARC and not EARC so could not pass lossless atmos. It surprised me how long this issue has been going and I wonder how many others have not experienced it due to their TV not being able to pass through a full Atmos signal.
Sonos Staff have mentioned they are aware of this issue in the community here and stated they were investigating, but that the matter was also an issue with other manufacturers products too and that’s certainly reported online, as links were provided to other soundbars having the issue. So it appears that it’s an issue where the ball is not in Sonos’ court - but I agree it needs an urgent fix, (if possible) by whoever is responsible - the last I saw, was to switch off using Atmos transcoded to multichannel LPCM (uncompressed) and use DD+ (Atmos) or DD TrueHD (Atmos) codecs instead. So perhaps try that.
I completely disagree with this statement. Simply because other manufacturers also have a defective product does not alleviate the responsibility Sonos has to its customer base and it’s reputed reputation as a premium quality sound system company.
While it is true, being a smaller company they do not have the resources that major manufacturers do when it comes to technical support or call centres. Being a smaller company, one would expect that when a large contingent of your customer base has the same defect with your product, the company would have a more hands on approach to a solution. One can argue this point all day.
My theory is derived from working for large Japanese corporation. Where deadlines for software and hardware forced releases of defective product. Deadlines caused by contracts with major retailers for shelf space.
Sonos does not have this issue. They have the time and freedom to address defects and errors. I’ve searched for this issue in other products. So far none have the same mitigating factors that this error has.
As I’ve already stated, if this was an easy software fix, it would have been implemented. Granted at the time the Sonos Arc was introduced, eARC TVs were few and far between ,due to the limited number of models and the excessive cost of premium TVs released to the consumer market, obviously the Sonos engineers designed the Sonos while testing their units on the current eArc TVs at the time, and possibly never tested them with an Xbox Series X during development. Considering how old the Sonos Arc is, there has been more then enough opportunity to address the error.
When a company released a product that is advertised to be one of the best Dolby Atmos sound bars on the market, and then said product has a defect that prohibits the Dolby Atmos product to play Dolby Atmos. Do I really have to spell this out?
And if you’re saying that Sonos Reps have told you that “Oh this is a known issue and other companies have the same issue, here’s some links to other posts talking about how other companies have the same problem” I call nonsense. That does not sound like a PR statement or a statement any representative of a company would make. Unless they either have no idea what they’re talking about, or were trained to tell the customer nonsense to… ‘nuff said.
Further testing:
My current state is Apple TV both CEC options on, Xbox all CEC off. Atmos on both, no pops yet. If you are affected by the pop, please try the following steps:
These were some of the links where other manufacturers had the popping issue…(I haven’t tested if they’re still valid)…
I cannot find anything recent that relates to this particular issue with other soundbars. The latest one (2 years ago) relates to a JBL soundbar. I cannot see any mention anywhere of other premium soundbars having this kind of issue.
A lot of those reports talk about popping/crackling noise whereas the Sonos is a loud bang - probably the term popping is not the right description in this case.
Well it was from an old thread - I did find these in a quick search;
https://www.cinemaequip.com/why-is-my-samsung-soundbar-making-crackling-noise/
https://www.theaudiocritic.com/why-does-my-soundbar-make-popping-noises-n25
If I find others, when I have more time, I will post them.
It’s not an issue I’ve personally encountered with my Arc or Beam, but then again I don’t use MC LPCM as I don’t have an Xbox or Apple TV 4K etc. (however I do use Dolby Vision FWIW🤔?)
As I’ve clearly stated, there is a sure fire way to recreate the error. I’ve read your links, and I’ve searched other articles when I initially encountered this error. NONE of these links including the ones you’ve mentioned are relevant as they are not the same error and do not have the same mitigating factors that cause the issue. We have all tried looking for solutions and reasons, hence discovering this thread.
Do you have a vested interest in Sonos stock? 🧐 All joking aside. I’ve thoroughly tried to find other links of other sound bars that have the same factors that result in the exact same kind of error. Nothing. Which is how I ended up on this thread.
On every product I own, I personally take them apart and fix them if I can find a solution. If it is not too costly. So I spend a lot of time on message boards and Reddit. I have not found anything on other sound bars that are relevant to this issue.
My DV comment wasn’t aimed at you. Earlier in the discussion there was a recommendation to turn off DV on the Xbox. Turning off DV seems to help on Apple TV, but not on Xbox.
Professor, I’m gathering your comment is aimed at my personal experience in which turning off Dolby vision on the Xbox has in fact solved my popping issue. I have been more than two months pop free with it off. I even tried turning it back on to which the popping started again just to make sure it was that feature which was causing the issues for me
This leads me to believe it is one of the other pieces of the chain then. The two that come to mind are
Are any of these different in your setup?
So Sonos what is the solution if I want Dolby Atmos on my ARC? Hello? Are you there?
I know this is a community. But I'm frustrated. Please, read all comments from the beginning of this thread. Then there are probably 50 more threads about this problem in this community. The community has called support, reported and also emailed SONOS CEO. But nothing happens for more than a year. What is going on?
Just had this happen to my new Sonos Arc. Series of loud electronic popping sounds, followed by the Arc shutting down. Extremely alarming because I sounded like one or more speakers had failed and blown up.
For context, was playing YouTube videos from my PC to my LC C2 TV via HDMI 2.1. On the TV I have eARC with passthrough turned on, and on the PC I had Dolby Access/Atmos set up in the sound settings.
Contacted Sonos support, shared my logs, and got the usual “known issue” response. Clearly this is going to be an ongoing issue, given that it has been happening to people for years now. Definitely don’t want to turn Dolby features off, since I’ve paid a lot of money for said features.
Yes, we’re all unfortunately in the same boat. This issue has been known for over a year, with no fix, no update and no support.
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