Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss



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Userlevel 4
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I’m reading in the YouTube replies on the video that some have had Sonos replace their Arc. Has anyone here had a replacement and did it help? How long had you owned your Arc when they agreed to replace it? I got mine very early on in it’s availability and the popping has been going on for nearly 2 years. 

Did not help for me, they sent me a replacement arc and I still had/have the problem.

 

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A friend of mine has been playing PS5 with Dolby Atmos MAT for days and has no problems. He has an Arc + LG CX (2020) and I have the same setup only with the LG CS9 (2022). For me it pops within 10 minutes and for him it doesn't pop at all. The only question is, is it the TV or isn't every Sonos Arc affected? He plays today Spider-Man 2 for 6h and no pop.

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  1. My TV is a Sony 900H. I am away from my TV right now so I can’t look up the exact name of the setting, but I’ve tried on and off for the “bitstream” passthrough setting on the TV. 
     
  2. I use the supplied cables for Xbox and Arc. I’ve also tried switching the Arc cable for an optical HDMI cable, thereby I traducing an additional physical layer signal conversion (electric → optical → electric) to no effect. 

As I mentioned, if I turn off DV and content matching on my Apple TV, it seems to get rid of the pop and returns when I turn it back on. Doing the same on the Xbox does not. 

I think we must all admit that DV having any effect in any setting is strange since it’s not an audio setting to begin with. I think it’s just as likely that whatever bug the Arc has is a subtle interaction in its code and DV happens to only sometimes touch it. Could be something as obscure as where items are in memory on the Arc. Some pointer is dereferenced badly, or a buffer overflows, or a variable is having its type changed wrongly; and it just happens to go into memory where it shouldn’t and whatever DV thing happens to live in that memory either has a popping value in it or it doesn’t.

In other words, I would caution you against taking just your experience (n=1) and generalizing from it what the problem or solution is. We need to find a diagnosis and solution that is replicable across users to solve this puzzle. 

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I have the pop/bang issue as well.  What has “fixed” the issue for me was disabling Trueplay.  I think there is something getting corrupted in the Trueplay profile that affects Atmos/MAT encoding.  

Same issue for me as described above. My diagnostic report is 591027322. Happened with an Apple TV 4K connected to a Sony x900h while watching a movie with Dolby Atmos.

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check with HDMI CEC turned off if the problem persists.  I think it helped me

Hi guys,

 

I have the same issue and reported it to Sonos multiple times. They’ve said that it is very unusual and they have never heard about it. Well. It happened when streaming Dolby Atmos (Apple Music, Disney+, Netflix) on my AppleTV 4K but also via the apps (Disney+, Netflix) on my Philips OLED856/12. I am also using two Play:1s as rear speakers and it seems like the problem is not occuring when I delete them from the setup and just use Arc. I’ve asked support if they are too old and if the problem would be solved if I add two One instead. According to them, using the play:1s shouldn’t be a problem. Are you also using Play:1s in your setups?     

They switched my Arc for a new one and guess what, it just happened again. This is so annoying. It gets me every time.  

Not sure what to do, but clearly this is a bigger issue. 
 

Thanks 

Bastian 
 


 

 

Userlevel 7
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I’m able to reliably reproduce the issue, that’s how I captured it on video. I’ve offered to work with Sonos engineers to troubleshoot, so we’ll see if they’re able to do that remotely or not. 

Where are you located Tom? Sonos should come visit you to debug this, they have engineering offices in Boston, Santa Barbara and Seattle (and maybe some others too).

As a software guy myself, getting a consistent repro is key to bug determination. Lets not forget the time the MS Office engineer put his actual phone number in an error message in order to get someone to call him when the bug repro-ed. (After the initial euphoria about someone calling him, things got out of hand quickly...)

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I still have the same issues with Atmos, which involve audio loss every 15 minutes (for 1 second). The update didn’t yield results in my case.

Same thing has just happened to me, loud pop followed by no sound. Not sure if it's damaged now. Is there any way to check each individual speaker speaker on the arc?

Apple TV 4K seems to be a common denominator for a lot of the reports.

UPDATE: I had an HD Fury Arcana which I used with my older TV that only had an ARC port (never had this issue then). I have not used it since getting a new TV with an eARC port. I decided to try the HD Fury and have not encountered the issue in the last 48 hours. For clarity the below is the setup:

Apple TV 4K → HD Fury → Video to TV eARC and Audio to Sonos Arc system

If this resolves the issue, it would not be ideal for most since the HD Fury is a 249USD device.

I am having the same issue with the Sonos arc when used with Xbox series X. This is the second time this has happened so is there a fix yet?

 

Sent diagnostic 1364356135

Have this exact same issue, extremely loud pop which sounds like a speaker being blown followed by no audio, power cycling required to restore it, happens infrequently but very worrying when it does and sends my dog nuts.

Generally seems to happen when using my Xbox series x as others have mentioned which is using pass-through audio via my Samsung QN95A Tv, have had the problem since day dot and it also was present on my previous TV (same setup)  a Samsung Q95T.

I am having the same issue with the Sonos arc when used with Xbox series X. This is the second time this has happened so is there a fix yet?

 

Sent diagnostic 1364356135

The XBox does seem to be particularly prone to the "popping" issue (and it’s not always Sonos related). See below links. So it might be something that Microsoft, or Dolby, need to fix (perhaps?)

I have a 6 month old Arc and I get the same issue intermittently and it happens with Apple TV or Sky Q. A loud pop followed by sound loss for 3 seconds or so and then back to normal. This issue needs addressing.  

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I've only had the problem with my Xbox Series X so far and I've had it a number of times. Today I was able to reproduce it every time I played Forza 5 and then went to the dashboard. A few seconds later there was a loud bang and the LED on the arc burned orange. So I decided to turn off Dolby Vision because I've also read this here in the chat that it's supposed to help. I couldn't believe it, but in the Xbox settings I just unchecked "allow dolby vision" and "dolby vision for gaming" and since then I haven't been able to reproduce the problem. maybe it's just a coincidence, but when I had Dolby Vision active, the bang came every time in connection with Atmos. But this means doing without Dolby Vision and “only” using HDR10.

Userlevel 7
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Hi Folks,

We’ve still nothing to share at this point, but we are continuing to investigate this issue which is not specific to Sonos alone.

Userlevel 4
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You know, I can’t help but think that if it’s a known issue, ethically, Sonos should put a warning on the product page. Or maybe mention the malfunction in an FAQ.

Right now we keep having new customers that have to go through all these steps to figure out what’s even going wrong.

Hi @ProfessorFrag, after many trials i IMAGE MANAGEMENT in TV and XBOX I found that if I use 4K + 120hz the pop noise happens, I’ve been playing XBOX reducing to 60hz and no issue happened for at least a couple of ours… I thing there should be some bug or something which makes a relationship between hz image output and ATMOS. Could you please try? In my case running both DV enable at 60hz and DV disable at 60hz works so far good. I tried DV disable at 120hz and failed. I could try DV at 120Hz because my TV doesn’t accept it.

I have the exact same problem for two years !!! 4k120hz atmos have loud bang . If I select 4k 60hz then the bang will never show up . It’s so damn frustrating with this issue .  Disable CEC does not resolve the issue 

Userlevel 4
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I've only had the problem with my Xbox Series X so far and I've had it a number of times. Today I was able to reproduce it every time I played Forza 5 and then went to the dashboard. A few seconds later there was a loud bang and the LED on the arc burned orange. So I decided to turn off Dolby Vision because I've also read this here in the chat that it's supposed to help. I couldn't believe it, but in the Xbox settings I just unchecked "allow dolby vision" and "dolby vision for gaming" and since then I haven't been able to reproduce the problem. maybe it's just a coincidence, but when I had Dolby Vision active, the bang came every time in connection with Atmos. But this means doing without Dolby Vision and “only” using HDR10.

I have always had Dolby Vision disabled for gaming but I forgot why. It may have been a VRR thing. Either way I’ve been using HDR-10 and the issue exists. 

Userlevel 7
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Hi Folks,

We’ve still nothing to share at this point, but we are continuing to investigate this issue which is not specific to Sonos alone.

Which other hardware is it affecting, @Corry P ?

Userlevel 6
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I’m afraid I too got the bang with DV off on the XBOX. But if it fixes it for you and losing DV is worth Atmos to you, congratulations! Life has gotten a little better. 

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I have this same problem with Beam gen 2 and Atmos content (btw just realized most of my content nowadays is Dolby Atmos which is nice). Almost got a heart attack when it happened first time. A Loud pop and then a loss of sound. Is this harmful to the speaker?

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Gosh it’s disappointing to come back to this thread after so long and still see no fixes or transparency. After each system update I hope for improvement but nothing. My simple set up (Sonos Arc plus AppleTV) sounds great playing Atmos content until the damn gunshot and loss of sound. I was trying to watch the Mandolorian with my kids and it was happening every few minutes. We gave up in the end.

 

Here’s a video of it happening just now: Popping and loss of sound


In the past the frequency of “pops” seems to lessen when I unplug the Sonos and everything else, and then reconnect before I watch anything. Oddly tonight it started popping almost immediately.

Haven’t investigated the CEC fix but seems an odd one to me.

 

sigh.

 

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A friend of mine has been playing PS5 with Dolby Atmos MAT for days and has no problems. He has an Arc + LG CX (2020) and I have the same setup only with the LG CS9 (2022). For me it pops within 10 minutes and for him it doesn't pop at all. The only question is, is it the TV or isn't every Sonos Arc affected? He plays today Spider-Man 2 for 6h and no pop.

Both of you using same graphic mode with vrr?

saw someone in reddit with pop in spiderman 2, he change the audio setting in ps5 to av and 7.1 channels and the pop no more

 

Userlevel 4
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I've only had the problem with my Xbox Series X so far and I've had it a number of times. Today I was able to reproduce it every time I played Forza 5 and then went to the dashboard. A few seconds later there was a loud bang and the LED on the arc burned orange. So I decided to turn off Dolby Vision because I've also read this here in the chat that it's supposed to help. I couldn't believe it, but in the Xbox settings I just unchecked "allow dolby vision" and "dolby vision for gaming" and since then I haven't been able to reproduce the problem. maybe it's just a coincidence, but when I had Dolby Vision active, the bang came every time in connection with Atmos. But this means doing without Dolby Vision and “only” using HDR10.

This has worked for me without fail.  Remember that there aren’t very many games that natively support DV, so to me most games really dont do much more than HDR does anyway.  Atmos sound is far more valuable to have than DV at this stage

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