Contributor I

Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss

1202 replies
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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.

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T

Trigone

Lyricist I

Hi. I came across this post from Reddit. I just had this “pop” issue with my beam gen 2 while watching the new transformers movie on my Apple TV 4K and Sony 900h. This has never occurred with any other Atmos streaming. I haven’t changed any settings either. What’s the troubleshooting for this? Or am I understanding that there’s no fix and I own a brick now if I want to play atmos content?

P

ProfessorFrag

Enthusiast II

Some users here have had success with turning off Dolby Vision or turning off CEC. Neither has worked for everyone.

Official Sonos recommendation is to turn off Atmos on the Apple TV. That works for sure but, you know, sucks.

C

Cleary

Lyricist III

Adding my identical experience to this thread.

Sonos Arc. Xbox Series X with Dolby Atmos selected. CEC disabled. LGC1 utilizing eArc.

Loud pop (like a gunshot) whenever I leave a game running Dolby Atmos and return to the Xbox dashboard. Horrifying every time.

Grateful for RC12’s advocacy on this thread.

C’mon Sonos.

Cleary, you have identical hardware and setup to me. If you disable “Dolby Vision” and “Dolby Vision for gaming” on your Series X. Do you get the pop?

Update: turned off Dolby Vision on my Xbox Series X and played a couple hours with frequent jumps back to the dashboard. No gunshot pop sound as of yet!…

Xbox Series X in 4K/120fps mode with VRR. Both CEC and Dolby Vision are disabled. Dolby Atmos back on. Sonos Arc and Sonos Sub (Gen 3). LG C1 with Sonos Arc on eARC, Pass Through, Bitstream. SIMPLINK-CEC on LG C1 set to On,

Total conjecture: does some credence to the idea that the Xbox with 4K 120fps VRR Dolby vision is hitting the LGC1’s 40 gbps HDMI 2.1 with the Dolby MAT encoding on Dolby Atmos. Maybe?

Will keep testing (ie gaming for science)

Y

yeshuah

Lyricist I

Anyone tried the firmware update from today? If there are imrpovements. In the process of getting settled in a new apartment. Just got an LG C2 - but haven’t yet hooked up my arc. And I use Apple TV 4k. At my last apartment with an entry level LG TV I didn’t have any problems.

T

TheFlamesFan

Enthusiast II

Adding my identical experience to this thread.

Sonos Arc. Xbox Series X with Dolby Atmos selected. CEC disabled. LGC1 utilizing eArc.

Loud pop (like a gunshot) whenever I leave a game running Dolby Atmos and return to the Xbox dashboard. Horrifying every time.

Grateful for RC12’s advocacy on this thread.

C’mon Sonos.

Cleary, you have identical hardware and setup to me. If you disable “Dolby Vision” and “Dolby Vision for gaming” on your Series X. Do you get the pop?

Update: turned off Dolby Vision on my Xbox Series X and played a couple hours with frequent jumps back to the dashboard. No gunshot pop sound as of yet!…

Xbox Series X in 4K/120fps mode with VRR. Both CEC and Dolby Vision are disabled. Dolby Atmos back on. Sonos Arc and Sonos Sub (Gen 3). LG C1 with Sonos Arc on eARC, Pass Through, Bitstream. SIMPLINK-CEC on LG C1 set to On,

Total conjecture: does some credence to the idea that the Xbox with 4K 120fps VRR Dolby vision is hitting the LGC1’s 40 gbps HDMI 2.1 with the Dolby MAT encoding on Dolby Atmos. Maybe?

Will keep testing (ie gaming for science)

Glad to hear, figured it was worth trying seeing that you have identical hardware to me and get the pop in the exact same scenario I do.

Certainly leads to some interesting theories as to why the particular hardware configuration behaves once Dolby vision is removed. Does anybody have the pop on a LG C2 or C3? To expand clearys theroy, those TVs have 48 gbps ports while the C1 only has 40 gbps. The configuration above 4K/120 10 bit colour literally consumes all 40 gbps (actually more seeing DV is 12 bit colour, tunneled back to 10 bit)

Ive also never tested with 4K/60hz and DV on. But kinda scared to make changes now that it is behaving

L

LuiG

Enthusiast I

Adding my identical experience to this thread.

Sonos Arc. Xbox Series X with Dolby Atmos selected. CEC disabled. LGC1 utilizing eArc.

Loud pop (like a gunshot) whenever I leave a game running Dolby Atmos and return to the Xbox dashboard. Horrifying every time.

Grateful for RC12’s advocacy on this thread.

C’mon Sonos.

Cleary, you have identical hardware and setup to me. If you disable “Dolby Vision” and “Dolby Vision for gaming” on your Series X. Do you get the pop?

Update: turned off Dolby Vision on my Xbox Series X and played a couple hours with frequent jumps back to the dashboard. No gunshot pop sound as of yet!…

Xbox Series X in 4K/120fps mode with VRR. Both CEC and Dolby Vision are disabled. Dolby Atmos back on. Sonos Arc and Sonos Sub (Gen 3). LG C1 with Sonos Arc on eARC, Pass Through, Bitstream. SIMPLINK-CEC on LG C1 set to On,

Total conjecture: does some credence to the idea that the Xbox with 4K 120fps VRR Dolby vision is hitting the LGC1’s 40 gbps HDMI 2.1 with the Dolby MAT encoding on Dolby Atmos. Maybe?

Will keep testing (ie gaming for science)

Glad to hear, figured it was worth trying seeing that you have identical hardware to me and get the pop in the exact same scenario I do.

Certainly leads to some interesting theories as to why the particular hardware configuration behaves once Dolby vision is removed. Does anybody have the pop on a LG C2 or C3? To expand clearys theroy, those TVs have 48 gbps ports while the C1 only has 40 gbps. The configuration above 4K/120 10 bit colour literally consumes all 40 gbps (actually more seeing DV is 12 bit colour, tunneled back to 10 bit)

Ive also never tested with 4K/60hz and DV on. But kinda scared to make changes now that it is behaving

I was actually wondering the same thing. I would love to know if people with TV’s that have full bandwidth (48gbps) HDMI 2.1 are experiencing popping issues when using Atmos on XSX or ATV.

P

ProfessorFrag

Enthusiast II

Yes, I’m affected by the Sonos Pop on 48Gbps (Sony 900H). We’ve had many reports of Samsung users too in this thread.

L

LuiG

Enthusiast I

Apparently Sony dropped a beta update today for the PS5 to enable Dolby Atmos for games. Anyone have access to the beta and has been able to test if the popping issue is prevalent on the PS5?

C

Cleary

Lyricist III

Apparently Sony dropped a beta update today for the PS5 to enable Dolby Atmos for games. Anyone have access to the beta and has been able to test if the popping issue is prevalent on the PS5?

Will definitely try once I have access to the beta. PS5 doesn’t have Dolby Vision (should that be involved in the Dolby Atmos pop), but will be eager to test regardless.

K

KrylonBlue

Enthusiast II

Apparently Sony dropped a beta update today for the PS5 to enable Dolby Atmos for games. Anyone have access to the beta and has been able to test if the popping issue is prevalent on the PS5?

Will definitely try once I have access to the beta. PS5 doesn’t have Dolby Vision (should that be involved in the Dolby Atmos pop), but will be eager to test regardless.

I believe they’re using Atmos to power their 3D Audio. If it’s not MAT format we won’t see any issues. I’m hoping for the best because I’d love to use my PS5 with Atmos when Spider-Man 2 arrives

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