Hi there, this is kind of a follow up to:

Although I’m not the OP of that thread, and I’m well aware this is a known issue with no ETA at the moment, I’d like to share some info/discrepancies that I’ve seen from similar threads as well as to tell my own experience with the hope of narrowing down this issue as much as possible and perhaps help the engineering team find a fix or workaround sooner.

I’m not going to copy and paste all the other links here. It’s really easy to find them by just googling “sonos beam 2 metallic robotic sound”. You’ll find several threads in both this forum and reddit. Some are even about 4 years old.

The reported issue is the same, the beam produces some annoying metallic/robotic, like out of phase sound that is particularly noticeable with certain background sounds like crowds or waterfalls. 

This video makes it easy to detect:

 

But you have to play it over HDMI through the TV, if you do it via Airplay or bluetooth the issue doesn’t occur, which is something that all affected people seem to agree. It only affects HDMI outputs.

Also all people seem to agree that changing TVs and cables doesn’t fix it, which narrows it down to a Beam issue.

However, here’s where I’ve found a few discrepancies on all those threads:

Some people seem convinced that the issue exclusively occurs with multichannel outputs like 5-ch PCM or Dolby atmos, but it doesn’t happen on stereo. In my case, in always happens regardless of the audio output format. I can hear it from above video which is a stereo source (tested from both my TV’s native YT app as well as an Apple TV) and I can hear it as well from series like Ted Lasso which have a lot of crowd sounds in several episodes.

The same way, some people (from what I’ve seen, the same people that reports the issue only occurs with multichannel outputs) said that they could workaround the issue by adding rear speakers, which kind of makes sense since the Beam alone doesn’t have to mix and output all channels and instead they get distributed across the rears.

Nonetheless, some other people, like the thread above, reported that even with rears and a sub, the issue persisted. Which I think probably would’ve been my case had I tried adding rear speakers since I still hear the issue with stereo sources.

Now the interesting part here is that, apparently, Sonos engineering team has acknowledged this as a software issue with no ETA atm; however, the person that opened above’s thread came back mentioning that, after getting a replacement unit from Sonos, the issue was fixed. So this raises the questions:

Could we be dealing with two different issues? Or maybe the same issue triggered by different root causes? Otherwise, how can this be a software issue but not all units be affected? How can some people only hear the problem with multichannel sources (and fix it by adding rears) while others can hear it with stereo too?

I think it’d be great if any affected people could report their specific case and conditions that trigger the issue here.

Finally, I don’t want to sound rude, but the fact that this is a well known issue, reported several times and even acknowledged by the product team, but there’s still no ETA or even any update after several years, it’s really disappointing coming from a top brand like Sonos, and let’s be real, it’s highly probable that the product team is not and will never properly work on this issue otherwise it would’ve been fixed by now. I work on technical support too, and I know how these things work in the background, the same answer gets shared with the customers over and over again “our team is still working on it but there’s no ETA yet” while the reality is that this kind of answer means the team has actually relegated this issue to its lowest priority and will probably never have a proper look at it. I understand why though, teams have limited capacity and they have to prioritize things, but it’s still disappointing.