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I have problems with the speech enhancement feature in the Sonos app for my Era 300 and Era 100 systems. In the lastest  version of Sonos app for Android and iOS, appears the speech enhancement feature available for my Era 300 and Era 100 systems so it was a feature I was waiting, due to I use my speakers also as TV sound system but initially the equalization options in the app were so poor and didn't have an option for enhancement of the voice. In this new version of the app I tried to enable this feature that is available for both Era 300 and Era 100 but, several times I enabled, when I return to the app to verify that is enabled, this feature have disabled automatically after some minutes or hours. 

In the Sonos support chat have told me that this option is only available for Home theater systems and to be available for other systems is an error that will be corrected. I told to the support agent that will be desirable that Sonos don't remove this feature for non Home theater systems, but contrary to fix it to be available and functional for all Sonos speakers that many users also use it as TV or PC sound system and we also need that the equalization for the speech have an option to be enhance.

Some other people have the same problem?

 

I’ve never known the ‘speech enhancement’ feature to work on anything other than a 5.1 signal, in which there is a channel for voice to ‘boost’, and by definition, that requires the Sonos sound bars that connect to your TV. For other speakers, I haven’t found it particularly necessary, although I do think one time I went in and adjusted the EQ for a speaker/room that I was listening to a ‘book on tape’ on. In general, I’ve found the quality of sound to be exemplary, and not needing modification though. And I do listen to a lot of baseball broadcasts on various spears, from PLAY:3s, to PLAY:1s, to Sonos Ones, a Roam, and occasionally a PLAYBAR or Arc. And since the radio station I listen to is only in stereo at best, there is no ‘voice’ or center channel to boost. 


I’ve never known the ‘speech enhancement’ feature to work on anything other than a 5.1 signal, in which there is a channel for voice to ‘boost’, and by definition, that requires the Sonos sound bars that connect to your TV. For other speakers, I haven’t found it particularly necessary, although I do think one time I went in and adjusted the EQ for a speaker/room that I was listening to a ‘book on tape’ on. In general, I’ve found the quality of sound to be exemplary, and not needing modification though. And I do listen to a lot of baseball broadcasts on various spears, from PLAY:3s, to PLAY:1s, to Sonos Ones, a Roam, and occasionally a PLAYBAR or Arc. And since the radio station I listen to is only in stereo at best, there is no ‘voice’ or center channel to boost. 

The speech enhancement is not just to boost a "voice channel", there's is no "voice channel" in the multichannel systems because the frequency profile of the voices are heterogeneous and wide. Those systems use different hardware or software filters to segment sound sources and adjust the frequencies to send it to different drivers some cases with delay or modulated over other frequencies to virtualize the surround sound, so the voice can come from any location in the surround system.

In the case you will hear an podcast, YouTube video, streaming film, etc, you will have many different ranges of frequencies of different sound sources, so you can have hardware that do the equalization setup or (in case of Sonos and many current modern sound systems) you can have software processing to filter and boost or equalize diferente ranges of frequencies or an specific frequencies that corresponds to the sound profile you can enhance.

In this case Sonos could have this voice range frequencies enhancement in almost all their speakers that have at least to different types of drivers in each speaker to manage the wide audible frequencies range.


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