Sonos Era 300 wall mount positioning

Thanks Corry - appreciate the clarification.

One follow-up question - when inverted orientation is supported, will it be on a ‘per speaker’ basis, or will both speakers in the pair need to be oriented the same way?

In my room, one of the two surrounds is going to need to be mounted up high, but on the other side it will be most easily place on a counter at normal height. Do you know if this will be possible, or if both speakers in the pair will need to be inverted together?

Hi @Paul0521 

No-one has thought of putting that in the reference material, but I think I’m safe in saying that both units would need to be in the same orientation, and, importantly, at the same height. Please also note that in the inverted orientation Atmos rendering will not be as immersive, so even once inverted is supported, we’d still recommend the normal orientation wherever possible.

Hi @JackThr1ll3r 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

My room is quite big, my sofa height is 1.10m with headrest included. I was thinking to put the speakers above the armrests of the couch (wall mounts), a little over the ear level (this because of the headrest, I think it will “block” the sound somehow) so from 1.10m up, would that be a good thing to do?

I don’t see why not - sounds good to me (pun intended).

If you can somehow test things before drilling holes in the wall, I would recommend it. Compare locations and decide based on what sounds best to you.

Then it comes the distance from wall to the couch, I can leave up to 1 meter of space. What would you do if you were me? 

I don’t think you’d need a full metre. Again, I recommend trying things out and sticking with what sounds best to your ears (those are the ones that count). The following picture from our product page certainly doesn’t show a metre’s separation:

Remember not to angle the 300s towards the listening position - they should both face the wall the TV is against (as shown) as they are capable of channelling sound in the correct direction themselves.

I hope this helps, and I hope you enjoy your new speakers!

Doesn’t having these speakers setup this way contradict almost every Dolby and Sound calibration guideline?

https://www.dolby.com/siteassets/technologies/dolby-atmos/atmos-installation-guidelines-121318_r3.1.pdf

https://youtu.be/zLxVEHjWrt4

I fail to see how the above position would replicate center/side surrounds in a proper setup and would not want audio bounding on my left/right walls in this manner for left/right surrounds.

@Corry P Two questions:

1. Will the current Era 300 wall mounts support inverted mounting or will there be a different wall mount that accommodates this?
2. When you say “inverted is not yet supported”, does that mean if I mount them inverted today, they just won’t work at all?

Thanks

Hi @Music Nut 

The current wall mount for Era 300 makes this possible.

Quite possibly. If the speakers are tilted too far, they will stop playing. As support for inverted mounting hasn’t yet been added, the inversion will likely be seen by the speakers as an invalid tilt angle.

Also, TruePlay Tuning for inversion hasn’t yet been coded for.

I hope this helps.

Good afternoon, 

@Corry P 

I have my Era 300's inverted and tuned them with trueplay and they sound great.  I've checked audio to ensure left and right sounds were accurate and it seems correct. 

I also called Sonos customer support and they said they ran diagnostic and could see the trueplay set up ensuring the left is left (even inverted) and right is right.  

One suggestion would be that the Sonos App displays that they're inverted to help the confusion for installs.  

Thanks

Trevor

I recently became interested in the recommended positioning of the Sonos Era 300 speakers, and I must say I'm quite puzzled. Sonos' suggested setup, as documented here. Seems to contradict any recommended layout for Dolby Atmos, which can be found here: https://www.dolby.com/siteassets/technologies/dolby-atmos/atmos-installation-guidelines-121318_r3.1.pdf.

After purchasing a pair of Era 300s, I decided to run some tests and found that the recommended positioning appears to be less about clever engineering and more about a sacrificing choice made by the designers. It seems that the priority was fitting the speakers behind a couch in a small apartment, which led to the decision to place the rear left and right firing speakers furthest from the listener, as seen here: https://imgur.com/KNXFdcY. Unfortunately, this makes the speakers incompatible with certain setups, such as this one: https://imgur.com/Q0p7CxQ, as the speakers output to the reverse positions.

To solve this problem and achieve better sound for cinema, the speakers must be turned around, resulting in an aesthetically unappealing setup, as seen here: https://imgur.com/zydvtz1. It's disappointing that the product's quality has been sacrificed due to this decision. A simple solution would be to enable switching the left and right speaker firings via software. In my opinion, the lack of this feature is borderline moronic.

Hi @tjwilliam07 

I’m not sure what aspect of the inverted configuration is not yet supported by the software, but I am glad to hear you are happy with the results so far! Thanks for sharing.

Edit: In a senseful setup, you would have thought Sonos was aiming for something like this:  https://imgur.com/kQWv40y. Unfortunately, it seems that the outer speakers are performing as their rears in dedicated Atmos test tracks, and the outer speakers are performing as rears. Hence, they are reversed for some crazy reason.  

Edit edit: Well, this is more interesting. Someone in another forum had mentioned re-pairing the surrounds. After going through this, I have new results. The surrounds are now working as expected where the outer channels are the left/right and inner channels are rears making it possible to place against the wall. From this, and other posts I've been reading, it sounds like there's a few bugs that can occur upon pairing leading to undesirable results. The current recommendations are far from ideal in most homes that do not have a couch with a wall/outlets behind/near it and I would highly advise Sonos to look into that further.

Hi @thecodingart 

I’m glad to hear there’s been an improvement for you! Thanks for sharing.

Removing and adding surround speakers has always been a valid troubleshooting step to try when the surround speakers aren’t behaving as expected, but we are of course investigating such reports regarding Eras.