Minimum Volume is too loud to enjoy background music

Maybe my english skills are not the best, but you didn’t understand a word. 
Why do you think I have a problem with the LED and post a link for LED covers???
I wrote that the LED can be switched off in the SONOS app and that this is a great 
feature for bedroom use, but also a joke if on the other side the minimum volume is too loud
for bedroom use.

And this ongoing “move your speker further away” advice is just annoying. 
Imagine some people have rooms that do not a allow an other placement and/or
have mounted the speakers to the wall (like me) and/or like a specific placement
because they care about room design.

The problem is the speaker/app itself, not any use scenario.

@tesox 

I use the lightdims for the mic LED, as that allows the mic to be on with no light visible at night - Otherwise I can’t switch that feature off without losing voice control. I have three speakers in the bedroom, a Beam & surrounds (One’s) and even with 1% volume and set to ‘ambient’ I struggle to hear the playing music at that level, so I don’t think the volume needs to be any lower than it is. I do not consider myself to be ‘hard of hearing’ even in the slightest and the surrounds are placed close-by on bedside tables and within 3-4 feet away of my listening position, with the Beam set about 8 feet away. So I guess that Sonos need to cater for all users when setting the lowest volume available. Anyhow I’m fine with the lowest 1% volume (on the scale of 0-100%) as it currently stands and more often than not set it to higher than that setting. Had it been too noisy at 1% I would have toggled off the surrounds anyway, but that has never been necessary in my own use-case.

It’s pretty clear from this thread that there are a lot of people for whom the lowest volume is too loud, and it is an issue, though.

Given how much I paid to opt for Sonos as a home theatre solution, it seems slightly ridiculous that I would have to turn off the rear speakers, or cut out frequencies using night mode during the day, just to avoid an issue that my previous non-Sonos HT system did not suffer from. I don’t really want to have to sell this kit, but it’s looking like an option currently.

It seems that the volume currently only allows whole 0-100 values, and cannot do decimals. At the lowest end it’s either 0 or 1. When you set a volume limit it just reduces the number of available values, and spreads those numbers across the slider (hence if you were to set the volume limit to 5%, the speakers will be muted until the slider is at 20%). It really should be the case that when a volume limit is set the slider decreases the upper volume limit AND recalculates the volume sent by the slider to allow for extra granularity with the same number of steps (eg. If the default top end is 100, with increments of 1, but I set a volume limit that reduces this to 10, the volume should go up in 100 increments of 0.1, rather than 10 increments of 1).

This is why the ‘Best Answer’ here is not actually helpful, it mentions the additional granular slider control provided by a volume limit, but it doesn’t solve the fact that the granularity of volume control doesn’t actually change. 1% is still the lowest it goes, and that it’s too loud for some users.

If the software cannot handle volume values with decimals for some reason (presumably this is the case as the Sonos Developer docs only allow setVolume to be an integer from 0-100), then an attenuation checkbox (or even better custom input/slider in the settings alongside the upper volume limit) to reduce overall db output by -20db or similar would also help solve this issue.

It seems this is now solved on new devices such as the Roam. I just bought it and the minimum volume can be very very low. That’s so bad that I cannot reach the same low level on my 2 Sonos One second gen. 

Just adding a +1 on this issue. I’m relatively new to Sonos (six One SLs and a Beam Gen 2) and very disappointed that the One SL (stereo pair) minimum volume level is too high for falling asleep, or even for background for reading, using Spotify or Pandora. I have the bedroom speakers past the foot of the bed, so they’re not even close to me, but in a silent room it’s too much. I have used Trueplay and tried volume limit after volume limit. The minimum volume level, even if it takes more “clicks” to get from zero to 1 depending on the volume limit percentage, does not change, and continues to be too loud. Turning off Loudness and setting the bass and treble sliders to their lowest helps *very* slightly but is not enough (and also makes the music sound worse). 

Sonos! Is there any way we can please have a lower minimum volume? Even one “step” between 0 and 1 would be helpful - more than one between them would be a dream come true. It seems a lot of us would be incredibly grateful!

For decades a logarithmic volume control was used so that low volume had more fine control than high volume. There is a reason for that…

I live in rural area where my ambient noise is 25 dB (measured)
 

Wikipedia:

The 'log pot', that is, a potentiometer has a resistance, taper, or, "curve" (or law) of a logarithmic (log) form, is used as the volume control in audio power amplifiers, where it is also called an "audio taper pot", because the amplitude response of the human ear is approximately logarithmic. It ensures that on a volume control marked 0 to 10, for example, a setting of 5 sounds subjectively half as loud as a setting of 10. 

It’s been FOUR years of topics like this and still no solution. This is terrible. 1% is simply to loud for background music.

Just out of curiosity, how far are the speakers from your ears?