Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss

I have eARC set to Off on my Sony A80J (it is plugged into the HDMI 3 / eARC port though) and when I play Atmos content from my Apple TV4K (2nd Gen) it says Atmos / Atmos (DD+) depending on what screen you look at. 
 

Is there any benefit to turning on eARC to Auto from within my Sony A80J TV settings? Just to clarify, I’ve never heard this bang noise in my 1 year of ownership but it’s been Off…honestly afraid to turn it on at this point haha. 
 

Yes. eARC has major benefits over ARC. Better sound, better lip sync, the works. 
 

If you get the bang, you can always turn it back off. We haven’t had any reports of the bang happening with Dolby Digital Plus compressed Atmos. 

I’ve been using eARC and Pass Through as “Off” for the last year. 
 

To confirm, here are the settings I’m going to choose in my Sony A80J - 

Digital Audio Out: Auto 1
Dolby Digital Plus Output: Dolby Digital Plus
Pass Through Mode: Auto
eARC Mode: Auto

Does that look correct? 
 

Yup! You can also go into the Sonos App, System, About My System when listening to Atmos if you have a Dolby MAT source (Apple TV, Xbox, soon PS5). 
 

If it just says Atmos, you’re good. If it says Atmos (DD+), it’s being downgraded. 

It would be so much easier for them to fly one of their engineers out for a few days and pay you for using your home to test it. 🤣

I see Ars Technica has picked up on the Verges article and posted the story too. I’m glad to see it’s spreading. 
 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sonos-has-been-unable-to-fix-arc-soundbars-pop-of-death-for-over-2-years/

Might see a few more, as well.

A week ago someone mentioned the lack of coverage of the issue. I started hitting up the tip emails of every mainstream tech site I could find. 

Sonos needs to account for this and customers need to know what their $900 is buying.

I notice with eARC set to Auto that anything non Atmos (aka LPCM) sounds very soft. I really have to raise the volume to get it to sound like DD+
 

I heard little tiny pops with eARC turned on as well…so I turned it off as I’d like to avoid hearing this huge popping noise which I wasn’t even aware of until I read this thread (but I’ve always had eARC off so maybe that’s why?)
 

Thanks again for your assistance. 

Moderator edit: sectioned questions already answered here:

Ran into the article talking about this. I thought I had some weird unique problem apparently not. Mine happens with a gaming pc w/3080 at atmos mode. 

Hello all. I would like to take a second to thank @tomwarren for using his platform to bring attention to this issue - it’s long overdue. And to thank others on here who have continued to advocate for a solution. It’s frankly a shame that it has taken this much public pressure and complaining by a loyal customer base (myself included) to even get a public response from Sonos. I was even more dismayed by the generic and noncommittal response by Sonos to the article.

I will also share some information that *could* be helpful in the limited responses I have received from the Sonos technical team. In the diagnostic samples that I have provided, I have been told that the popping sound “doesn't happen when” the collected audio taps in the diagnostic are played back by the Sonos technical team. I don’t know enough about what specific details the diagnostics samples record or what is contained in these “audio taps.” I was also told that there are customers who have multiple Arcs that only have issues with one device, and when devices are swapped, the popping issue does not follow the Arc. I wonder if anyone here can confirm that. The implication would be that the etiology of the pop is an interoperability issue. More than anything, I think this just supports my argument: the pop isn’t following the device because it is being switched to a set-up that is no longer using a Dolby MAT format, thus alleviating this issue. This means that Arc is having issues with Dolby MAT, as I have explained previous.

Support did confirm that all of the pops and cracks “excite the Dolby Atmos (MAT) as the active format...but the decoded output is free of any objectionable artifact like a pop. It's possible that the pop - if it's indeed originating from the pipeline - to have occurred just prior to the MAT feed, in the form of PCM audio (even then, only in some and not all of the cases).” I personally do not see evidence that this is the case, as I have been watching my app data when a pop occurs, and the popping happens after Atmos content has already kicked in and is playing - I do not see any switching back to PCM audio.  

I was also told that “NSD on the TVP is not run on encoded content (we trust these signals to be kosher) and only offers audio Vs silence discrimination with PCM audio. i.e, if the audio signal itself contained an objectionable pop, we don't presently exercise the noise classification as an additional line of defense. The probability of such an event based on the many, many taps & diags, thus far, is evidently very low, though.” I honestly do not know enough to parse out what any of this means. As I have said before, despite my best efforts to self-educate (over many, many hours), I don’t think the end customer should have to be versed in these details - for $900, these devices should work out-of-the-box, and issues that arise should be fixed or advertising promptly changed. This also seems to suggest (as I have advocated previously) that Sonos *could* engineer a way to make these popping sounds FAR LESS damaging (ie gunshot scaring children, pets, and viewers) by enacting an additional line of defense if any of these issues are actually originating upstream (again, skeptical until proven otherwise that this is exclusively an upstream problem).

Of the four most recent diagnostics that I have submitted, I was told that “the taps are all 4 seconds long & barring [one sample] are entirely filled with silence. The sequence of events in these 4 diags are all very different, allowing for no common suspects to be easily revealed by the logs.” 

All of this leads me to wonder how helpful the diagnostics samples are in the first place. I don’t have enough technical-know-how to understand exactly what information is sent to Sonos what a diagnostic sample is submitted. I can’t square the fact that the Sonos support team hears “silence” in the audio tap when I feel like I’m gearing up for a home invasion. This makes me question whether the audio taps are truly providing robust information about the sounds being produced by the device. Honestly, to me, the popping sound is akin to an electrical surge. It’s like someone has shorted the speaker, blown a tweeter, and killed the power. Perhaps this isn’t being captured in the samples.

I share all this because Sonos has not provided much information from a technical side publicly. Perhaps someone more knowledgable than myself can use this to progress this issue. @tomwarren, I would encourage you and anyone else with a louder voice than the rest of us to keep the gas pedal on this issue - Sonos has demonstrated that the issue will die unless we continue to press for a solution. We have seen promised “work on a solution” for three years, always devoid of specifics or a timeline. At a minimum, they could commit to changing their product advertising until a solution is found. This would at least make me feel like they are not okay with continued false advertising and truly being upfront with new customers - until this is done, it’s hard to see any response from Sonos as being in good faith.

I see a number of comments on the articles written this week from potential customers that are now having second thoughts about purchasing an Arc - good, they should, until this issue is resolved. Sonos has demonstrated that they aren’t going to respond to this issue out of a commitment to customers alone - it’s going to have to start hurting sales and the bottom line, unfortunately. I hate that this has how the issue has evolved - I have invested substantively in the Sonos ecosystem and touted to so many family and friends. This used to be a brand that I believed in and supported, despite a premium price point. In order to build a brand for premium audio products, it seems like Business 101 is to provide reliable, meaningful customer service.