Arc Ultra volume varies depending on source

Well, yes maybe. But it is not just Apple. Also Qobuz as mentioned. Possibly others, I didn't check. But also my music library. Sonos Radio seems to be “throttled” for some bizarre reason.

I disagree totally with your note on 3. I think it should have a default starting volume as most hifi equipment does have. This is standard behaviour. Especially to avoid blasting people out of the room.

Your solution of my having to remember to turn Arc down before turning my tv on is ridiculous.

Hi ​@Glockers 

Yes - any service that provides values in the REPLAYGAIN tag, I assume.

I don’t know what you mean by “throttled”. That word would usually be used in terms of bandwidth - are you saying the bandwidth (bitrate) for Sonos Radio is too low? You can get a subscription to Sonos Radio HD for higher bandwidth on our own, curated stations, but that cannot apply to the third-party radio stations listed on Sonos Radio - they will broadcast at whatever bandwidth they see fit.

What volume do you think it should set itself to?

Well, I turn my volume down after watching any content for which I had to turn it up - I have never had this problem you describe.

All relates to volume. Crappy product design ig I have to “intervene” when listening to different inputs 

Different volume from different sources is unavoidable - even different songs on Spotify differ in volume.

On 3 a work around could be having an assistant like Alexa turn down the volume at a certain time every day.

Then every streaming device is a “Crappy product design” because all of them have varying volume levels by source (or even by individual songs, think of a soft acoustic ballad vs the 1912 Overture).  So I’m afraid you are never going to be happy. 

Amazing how many people feel the need to support poor product design in the comments.

If all streaming services vary then the product designers should be able to come up with a way to mitigate this. But in any case it is clearly not a post about minor variations in volume.

If you read my post(s) you would understand that on one side we have Sonos Radio (including Sonos stations) playing substantially louder than at least 3 named other independent sources - Apple, Qobuz, My Library. And that this all comes together in the Arc because it includes a TV input. Which actually lends itself to a solution.

Cheers 

I notice some difference when playing regular CD’s through a CD player connected to an old world receiver.

One way of handling this issue would be to pass the whole universe of music tracks through an algorithm that assigns a “gain” setting to each track. This gain setting would then be used by the player to set the playback level for each track. I don’t think that this would be a practical project and there would still be some disagreements with respect to specific tracks that the producer might want to play quieter.

Another, more practical approach would be to use a “compressor” device or algorithm to limit the dynamic range (difference between loud and quiet) of music passing through the player. Popular music radio stations, many music companies, and websites use this technique as they distribute their music. While this has some benefits when listening to music in noisy environments, and it has been shown to sell more music and attract more listeners, in my opinion it results in lifeless music. Many years ago a compression function was added to a CD player. The function was adjustable, not understood by the public, and was never included in another model. It would be inexpensive to add this feature to a modern player, but I’m afraid that the unit would then be classified as “complicated” and avoided by the public.

On Apple music there is a setting that levels the audio for songs, so you don’t get those big differences, and on TVs there are options to level the audio between channels etc. So some sort of levelling should be possible.

It’s called “Sound Check” on Apple Music. The volume can vary wildly on songs without it enabled. It would be nice if SONOS integrated such an option into their app too where it does a volume check before playing from a connected source so it can normalise the volume. 

You could use AirPlay to send Apple Music to the SONOS system.

It would be difficult for SONOS to develop a Sound Check capability for music in general because the whole album would need to be scanned before beginning to play any track from the album. Apple Music has the advantage because they can scan the album (once) and set a field in their metadata before adding it to their library.

This could easily be fixed by one of, or both of these toggles:

1. Set the volume to 0 (or desired level) when switching from another source to TV.
2. Remember last volume level for TV, instead of the last volume level in general.

These options could be where the TV autoplay toggles are. I think number 2 makes the most sense, and would expect it to be the default, but you can have it off to not alter the functionality automatically. In time maybe introduce this to other source types also, but I agree that the TV volume is the main issue.