14.12 Update

Sorry I couldn’t read your mind in regards to your reference. Apologies for the inconvenience, please resume discussing amongst yourselves I’ll see myself out. 

They probably do, and I fully expect to suffer the repercussions, whatever they may be.  But that does not take away from the fact everything I said was 100% truth.  

It’s up to moderators to decide that, but I would say yes. If I was a moderator, I would have removed that post and quite possibly quite a few others.  Some people try to get around the TOS about insult or diminish the views of others by referring to ‘Sonos fans’ or ‘he’….maybe even ‘a user’.  

I didn’t think my original post was that vague, but ok.

If you search for "Peter Pee" on YouTube he has done a sound analysis between 14.10 and 14.12, unfortunately it doesn't include the sub though.

I’m actually fine with Peter Pee’s review of the 14.10/14.12 changes and agree with him that putting ‘up’ the Arc’s volume a short distance and taking the treble up a notch, or so, brings things back to as they were (more or less) in the 14.10 build. That has been my experience at least, and I also accept the changes have brought about clarity to the center channel speech/dialogue.

I had wished for one other things that Peter might have checked, that’s if the Arc at full volume was the same in both builds. I think that might be the case …and all that changed volume-wise was the volume curve and not the overall volume of the Arc.

I guess it’s too much to ask Peter to go back and do all again with a sub, or two subs, or to try the Arc comparison with/without different surrounds. I don’t believe he ought to bother, as we may see another update before he could get around to that arduous task anyway.

Plus Sonos have said that if users have an issue with their attached Sub, after trueplaying their Arc room, to temporarily disable Trueplay, as they are looking into that issue for some users and will likely release an update to sort that matter.

The Arc I have here at Home, has ‘Fives’ as it’s surrounds and a Sub and I (by choice) have left Trueplay off and have no issues with the rooms Bass output.. I can/could make the walls shake as much as before if I push up the Sub volume slider. I accept though some are seeing issues in this area and it’s a case of waiting to see what the next update may bring.

I will also say that prior to this recent update, some users in the community here, had put forward a feature-request to Sonos to allow adjustment to their HT center channel volume to help increase clarity of dialogue and I see Peter Pee mentions that option too - I also like that idea, but obviously there maybe technical reasons why this has not been part of the recent solution. That’s perhaps a matter for Sonos to consider.

Also, just to add, I have put in another suggestion for consideration and that is Sonos HT products allow for the manual balancing of the left/right channel audio, as I think some (simple-only) customisation tools in the hands of a user may help to please more of the user-majority. However I don’t think complicated customisation options need be in the hands of a user, as in the wrong hands, things can sometimes sound worse, rather than better, but perhaps a ‘little more’ simple customisation options may go a long way. 

As always, such suggestions/feature requests, are probably easier said, than done… and the aim for me is that the default audio-out from a Sonos product should be as near as possible to the original recording and the way the sound engineers want us to hear their work. The customisation that follows on from that, is to fine-tune things to the listening environment and how we each like to hear some things ourselves (I see them as just minor manual adjustments to the results of Trueplay, as we each hear some things differently and may often move around in a room ourselves).

Just on that point, what source did he use to get that curve comparison? For example white noise? I'm struggling to understand why 14.12 is more 'tinny' (female vocals for example) than the  14.10 curve. The area on the graph where I expect to see an increased 'tinnyness' so to speak is not really shown and looks the same. So I'm wondering if algorithms play into it for detecting voice and amplifies those but other sound remains flat or similar to 14.10's profile. In other words Peter Pee's overlayed comparison certainly doesn't 'show' the differences I hear if that makes sense.

I have a complete setup with ARC+SUB+one sl’s as surround, I have disabled Trueplay and I don’t have issue with the sub output. The issue what I am facing is at any particular volume level the output from ARC is relatively low compared to that from the surround speakers. I got my setup last week post the 14.12 update and I am reaching out to community members with a similar setup to share their experience while listening to music or watching TV. 

Do other users with a similar setup also see this issue where volume output from ARC is not as good as one sl’s. In the announcement above SONOS have mentioned that they have changed the spectral balance of ARC and SUB, my concern is they didn’t mention if they did it for all of the devices in their eco-system. I think because of this the overall sound from the home theatre setup is messed up and SONOS is not even aware of this particular problem. In the announcement they are boasting it as an speech enhancement feature from the central channel. I am curious to know how the whole setup is performing for other users.

@rp105 If you are not using Trueplay to tune your system, you will need to go into settings and adjust the settings for both distance and volume level of your surrounds.  Trueplay does that for you based upon sound measurements from your listening position.  If you manually adjust those settings from your preferred listening spot, it should sort out your mismatched volume setting.

3 weeks since this terrible update and I can’t get used to it. I don’t even want to watch tv/movies anymore, and music couldn’t sound worse. This is giving me such bad anxiety. I can’t enjoy my sound systems anymore. I have to listen to music through my Echo Show now. No faith in the upcoming update at all, as it seems they are only going to fix the Trueplay and sub issues. Dialogue sounds worse imo. More hollow than before. What about the low volume??? I can’t turn my system up any higher then I already am. I don’t understand why you would make such drastic changes especially after the 14.10 update which was great and had my speakers finally sounding awesome. I know some of you are happy with it, and that’s great, but it seems like the majority of people are very unhappy. I hope ALL issues are addressed.