"sibilant" or "hissing” sounds on Beam Gen2 when listening to the spoken word on radio

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Good day, I have noticed significant "sibilant" or "hissing” sounds on Beam Gen2 when listening to BBC Radio 4 (spoken word). Therefore, the speakers were returned.

Which other Sonos products do not have a similar issue? Thanks!

kdowlingAnswer

There may have been something wrong with your Beam 2, like Airgetlam said. I’ve never experienced that with any Sonos speakers, including a Beam 2.

Did you hear that with any other spoken word programs, besides BBC Radio 4? Are you playing it with the Sonos app? Did you hear it on any other Sonos speakers?

A call to Sonos support may have gotten you a warranty replacement if the Beam 2 was in fact defective.

Airgetlam

Not that I’m aware of, even on the Beam in general, especially if you’ve run TruePlay on it. I wonder if there was a manufacturing error of some type on that specific speaker. I listen to spoken word (baseball games and audio books) a lot, and have never found any of my speakers to be ‘sibilant’ or ‘hissing’.

Bruce

kdowlingAnswer

There may have been something wrong with your Beam 2, like Airgetlam said. I’ve never experienced that with any Sonos speakers, including a Beam 2.

Did you hear that with any other spoken word programs, besides BBC Radio 4? Are you playing it with the Sonos app? Did you hear it on any other Sonos speakers?

A call to Sonos support may have gotten you a warranty replacement if the Beam 2 was in fact defective.

Airgetlam

There’s also the possibility of extra ‘sibilance’ in the stream from the BBC…

Bruce

R

Radio4Author

Contributor I

Appreciate the replies. I agree as that something may be wrong with the tweeter as it also happened with other high res streams. If I compare a Bose side-by-side, it is obvious. BTW the “speech enhancement” setting only works for speech in movies, I found.

Any recommendations, if the Arc should do much better? Any other high quality speakers recommendation?

kdowling

Appreciate the replies. I agree as that something may be wrong with the tweeter as it also happened with other high res streams. If I compare a Bose side-by-side, it is obvious. BTW the “speech enhancement” setting only works for speech in movies, I found.

“Speech Enhancement” is a Home Theater setting and only applies to TV audio.

Any recommendations, if the Arc should do much better? Any other high quality speakers recommendation?

Since the problem was probably a defective Beam 2, any correctly working Sonos soundbar would be better. Including a Beam 2.

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