Hi

Sonos doesn’t offer any type of simulated digital processing effects on any of its sound bars (Playbar/Playbase) including the Arc, Beam 2 and Ray. Sonos only processes the actual codec for DD, DD5.1, DTS Surround and/or Dolby Atmos depending upon which soundbar you own.

However, on my Arc with sub and surrounds I get the broadcaster voice mainly from the Arc and crowd noises from the rears when it's a DD5.1 broadcast.

I think this may perhaps depend on the audio source codec you’re perhaps listening to.. The Sonos HT devices do not tamper with the audio received - the audio is played as soon as practicable to keep in sync with video on screen and in keeping with what the sound engineer wants the listener to hear.

If you were watching Sports on TV, recorded in Dolby Atmos immersive surround sound, with a full Sonos HT setup, with rears, height channels & Sub, then you should hear/feel like you’re standing in the stadium, or as near as dammit. If you’re listening to a PCM 2.0 stereo audio recording outputting on the front left/right channels only, then the experience is somewhat less effective.

Not sure why you would be disappointed with the lack of Yamaha DSP modes on a SONOS Soundbar, it’s never been mentioned as a ‘feature’ of any SONOS product.

The cost of the kit is irrelevant, if you like Yamaha DSP modes stick with Yamaha.

Yamaha is known for being DSP crazy, far more than any other manufacturer.  I agree with the above, if you are missing Yamaha's DSP's, your only real choice is Yamaha.

I suppose given the expense I was expecting much better sound quality and options for the television. I certainly like my Sonos for music. But I've had several systems at a fraction of the cost that, for me, are much more flexible. I guess I don't understand why Sonos cannot or does not offer options

Some companies don't like 30 different sound profiles, they want all their systems to sound like they designed them to.  Hence Sonos' use of trueplay and only 2 slightly different profiles in night mode and dialog enhance.  Others, like DSP crazy Yamaha, have dozens of sound profiles.  I always disliked Yamahas' approach, which is why I purchased Sonos.

Loved the Yamaha idea, lusted after a DSP-1 Digital Sound Field Processor but was never in a position to add one at $850. Years later I got a Yamaha AVR and had great fun with the sound fields at first but once the novelty wore off I rarely used them.

https://www.yamaha.com/en/about/innovation/collection/detail/7014/

Today $50 on ebay.

Back in 1985 I worked on the launch event of the DSP-1 at the Sheraton in Edinburgh, we managed to pop a few NS-10m’s during testing with Top Gun. It was a big room :)

There is always a tug-of-war between the “never enough buttons” and “always too many buttons” crowds. Neither can understand the other’s point of view. Purchase the unit that has enough buttons for your taste.

I suppose that there could be two controller Apps or a single App with an option, ‘basic” and ‘advanced’ (or ‘pro’), however, this would probably be perceived as yet another complication.

I could be off on this, but I would think that that trueplay tuning for room correction and DSP effects would not blend that well together.  What I mean is that tuning is trueplay tuning results in changing the relavtive volume and frequency of audio to account for the room.  DSP effects does something similar, although it doesn’t take room effects into account, and overlaying trueplay and DSP effects to audio could result in a mess.  Perhaps engineers would have to provide separate routines to account for trueplay tuning under different effects to get it right, so you’ve multiplied the effort to properly tune your system by adding these effects?

Not sure if that makes sense.  I mean, a source obviously can created with different ‘effects’ built in to the source that would not have an impact on trueplay.

Another factor, that could be nonsense, is that Sonos does need to minimize the time it takes for audio to be played on wirelessly connected speakers in order to stay in sync with video.  Therefore, they would not want to add any additional processing.  I don’t know that DSP processing would add significant ms to the processing time though.

I suspect, as others have pointed out, that the main reason is that Sonos just wants to keep their speakers as less complex as possible for user friendliness.  I also think Sonos believes that most people will listen to their speakers in a friends home before they buy, so they don’t want that potential customer being turned off by some weird DSP effect that the home owner might be playing around with.

I don’t see any major conflict between Trueplay and Hall Effects. First Trueplay characterizes the room, creating a base platform, then Hall Effects can be incorporated. This is the approach taken by many A/V receivers.

Yes that’s certainly the case. I had the Sony Home Theatre HT-AS5 many years ago and that had auto/manual room-correction calibration (it came with a plugin mic. and very long cable) and there were various DSP built-in sound effects, such as ‘sports’, ‘news’, ‘movies’ & ‘games’ etc. I mostly left it on its AFD Standard (default) setting - The ‘sports’ effect, as an example, was designed to create a stadium-like effect, but of course it was just a delay ‘echo’ to some speakers and it sounded really awful, particularly when commentators were talking over the action on screen and their voices echoing around the room too… I couldn’t stand to listen to it.

The Beam and Arc (with surrounds/sub) that we use now in various rooms anround our Home are so much better and far more natural & realistic IMHO - especially when playing surround sound codecs.

I don’t miss the Sony HT-AS5 audio effects, truth be told.