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Sonos Arc mic not sensitive enough

  • 13 July 2023
  • 3 replies
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G

We have had a Sonos Move in our living room for a few years, and find it responds pretty well to the Alexa wake word - sometimes we have to mute the TV or speak up a little, but it’s rare.

We have recently bought an Arc, and inherited a couple of Ones to use as rear surrounds.

The Arc is the same distance away from the sofa as the Move (4-5 metres), yet it really struggles to pick up the Alexa wake word.  We are having to shout to get it to wait, and then usually having to repeat what we want as it doesn’t hear us.  

The Ones are about 1.5-2 metres away from the sofa, and we thought maybe we could use them for voice controls.  However, it seems as soon as they are added as surrounds, they have their mics disabled (making them pretty much One SLs).

Short of buying an Echo Flex to purely use for voice control (and somehow getting it to use the Sonos for all output), is there anything I can do to make the system hear us?

Shouting at the TV is not ideal really...

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Best answer by Ken_Griffiths 13 July 2023, 15:43

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3 replies

Ken_Griffiths

We have had a Sonos Move in our living room for a few years, and find it responds pretty well to the Alexa wake word - sometimes we have to mute the TV or speak up a little, but it’s rare.

We have recently bought an Arc, and inherited a couple of Ones to use as rear surrounds.

The Arc is the same distance away from the sofa as the Move (4-5 metres), yet it really struggles to pick up the Alexa wake word.  We are having to shout to get it to wait, and then usually having to repeat what we want as it doesn’t hear us.  

The Ones are about 1.5-2 metres away from the sofa, and we thought maybe we could use them for voice controls.  However, it seems as soon as they are added as surrounds, they have their mics disabled (making them pretty much One SLs).

Short of buying an Echo Flex to purely use for voice control (and somehow getting it to use the Sonos for all output), is there anything I can do to make the system hear us?

Shouting at the TV is not ideal really...

The Surrounds (Ones) microphones are not disabled. You just need to add the Alexa voice assistant to them to activate their mic.

Goto the Arc’s room settings in ‘Settings/System’ in the Sonos App and scroll down to ‘Voice/Amazon Alexa’ if you select that, you will see you can add Alexa to either/both surrounds.

G

Excellent - that seems to work!

I was sure that during the setup where you add the surrounds, it says it has activated Alexa on the surrounds automatically.  I must have mis-read what it said.

Thanks 👌

Ken_Griffiths

I would also maybe try powering off the Arc for a few minutes too and see if that gets its mic working as it should be - the Arc here picks up our voice requests okay, but we don’t have the TV any louder than 35% volume-level most of the time .. and the primary seating in the room is not much further away than approx. 8-10 feet.

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