Sonos Arc loud pop then audio loss


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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.

Corry P 4 months ago

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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Same thing here. I experienced it last night for the first time and then again just now. Last night it was while turning on Ted lasso on the Apple TV+ app and now on Disney +. 

 

I am using: a

Samsung KS8000

Apple TV 4K

Sonos Arc

2x Sonos Ones

Gen 3 Sub

I also experienced the loud loud pops then only audio from the surround speakers continuing to play. 

 

Diagnostic report 1030162427

 

Userlevel 3
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X900H (XH92)

Apple TV 4K (2nd Gen)

Arc

2x One Surrounds

Sub (Gen 2)

 


 

Seems like most of us here experiencing the issue are using surrounds; just checking for consistencies, has anyone experienced without rears?

Had the same thing happen to me a few days ago. Once when watching a movie from iTunes and once from Disney+.  Both were outputting Dolby Atmos at the time. 
 

My setup:

Sony X900H 

Apple TV 4K (2nd Gen)

Arc

Sub (Gen 3)

I just had the same issue occur, which brought me to this thread.  I have an Arc, sub gen 3, and Play:1s for surrounds.  I’ve had the Arc for three months and the sub for two weeks.  First time this has happened.

 
I submitted diagnostic report number 726247310.

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I just had the same issue occur, which brought me to this thread.  I have an Arc, sub gen 3, and Play:1s for surrounds.  I’ve had the Arc for three months and the sub for two weeks.  First time this has happened.

 
I submitted diagnostic report number 726247310.

Apple TV or Xbox Series X?

I am using a Roku Ultra, the 2020 version, with Dolby Atmos.

 

 

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I am using a Roku Ultra, the 2020 version, with Dolby Atmos.

 

 

Interesting. First I've heard of Roku having issues, I haven't scrolled all the way back through this thread.

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”.

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.

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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. 😕

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”.

 

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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.

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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.

 

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!

 

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...

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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. 

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.

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 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:

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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.

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.

 

I think the problem is that it isn’t a Sonos issue, so Sonos can’t really ‘fix’ it. It has to be fixed upstream, before the ‘pop’ is being sent to the Sonos. 

The issue is occurring across multiple type of streaming devices and TVs.  The common device between everyone reporting the issue is the Sonos.  Granted this is a Sonos forum, but what would lead you to believe that another device is causing the issue?

Because it doesn’t happen on all systems, for instance on mine, which are Vizios, and all reports seem to be centered around either XBox or Apple TV devices. If it’s limited to specific types of device inputs, and doesn’t occur across all types of TV sets, that suggests at least the possibility that the event is occurring upstream from the Sonos device. 

In the past, when there has been an issue with Sonos, they’ve been pretty clear about admitting it as a cause, and indicated that they were working on the issue. At one point, there was a thread with thousands of posts from users of the PLAYBAR that were experiencing an issue. So far, Sonos has not said anything about this issue being on their side. 

None of that is definitive proof, mind you, but I would also assert there is no definitive proof in these forums that it happens to be a Sonos issue. You’re certainly welcome to draw your own conclusions, and would likely be as accurate as I am. I’m open to any potential solution to the problem. But, if it happens not to be a Sonos software issue, I logically can’t expect them to fix it. If it is indeed their issue, I expect them to own it, admit it, and rectify it. So far, none of those items have occurred. 

I have the same problem since a few months now. Xbox Series X; Sony XH900 with Arc + ONE SL + Sub.

 

my support file: 1523225932

 

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So I ran into the issue twice more over the weekend (one from ATV and one from Xbox) and I noticed a pattern starting to emerge.  I have the issue occur in bunches and then after a hard reset of the Sonos system it goes away for a month or two with no other resets in between

 

I am wondering if the working software isn’t experiencing some sort of memory leak as after a reboot it’s rock solid for weeks on end and then happens two and three times in a single evening

 

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