Enthusiast II

Answered

Volume levels too high after 15.2 update

170 replies
12392 views

Good evening,

My system updated to 15.2 today and following this update, all of my speakers’ volumes are easily double what they were before.

I run one of my Play 1’s at volume 4 at night and have done for years, but volume 4 is now way too loud and even setting it to 1 is very loud.

I have 2x Play 1’s, 1x Play 3 and the latest Five and it’s the same on all of them.

I’ve had to set a volume limit of 50% on each speaker but now all of my volume references for me and my family are all over the place which is incredibly annoying.

Any ideas?

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Corry PAnswer

Sonos Staff

Hi @Tom_69 et al

Thank you @Tom_69 for bringing it to our attention that we did not yet update this thread - this was an error on our part, and apologies for the lateness.

With the advent of spatial audio from Apple Music becoming available to play on Sonos devices, Apple expressed an interest in actioning a change due to the volumes of stereo tracks being inconsistent with each other and with tracks from other music providers. In line with this, and with long-standing requests from our customers to apply volume normalisation to tracks, we have added to our speakers a response to the normalisation figures provided.

The current behaviour of the sound volume is intentional and by design. Due to the way we now utilise volume normalisation metadata from Apple Music in update 15.2, average loudness is now better aligned between different tracks. Some stereo tracks may appear louder than before and some stereo tracks may appear quieter as a result, but as I said this is expected behaviour.

Knowledge of these changes were not widely distributed internally, hence the reason why we raised this as a possible "bug" on the basis of everyone's experience on this thread. We aim to improve this in the future to minimise the chance of this sort of misunderstanding happening again.

I understand this is not ideal for everyone, and as such I have internally raised as a feature request the option to disable this normalisation process at will from within the Sonos app.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

Show previous replies

M

Morter81

Lyricist III

@Corry P why can't these imposed changes that 15.2 implemented be reverted? Surely this would fix the issue.

Amazon music also suffers here. Noticeably between songs due to the different audio formats, but there is no may to limit/set it to only play Dobly, Ultra HD or HD tracks.

Like most here I've had forgo listening to music on my sonos system due to the volume inconsistencies, and previous sonos advice (e.g. stream to different speaker/system or use different audio source) is poor support.

M

Morter81

Lyricist III

Just to add, my thanks to @Tom_69 for keeping this thread on this issue alive until a fix is provided.

C

codeman318

Lyricist III

My Sonos system was perfect before 15.2 At the very least, let us revert back to a prior firmware. I do not have any Era speakers, nor do I play Atmos through the app, thus being able to go back to 15.2 would work for me.

AirPlay has allowed for volume normalization for me for Apple Music (through Apple’s settings), but AirPlay is buggy and consistently knocks speakers off. Playing Apple Music through the app, like others have stated, the 1% volume of AM is STILL too loud (especially at night), and there needs to be a normalization option for when streaming Spotify and/or Apple Music within the app so we don’t have to rely on shoddy AirPlay.

K

Kugelfang

Lyricist III

Same for me, normalizations within one source and across multiple providers is a great goal and would be a much appreciated improvement.

However, in the case of Apple Music a volume level of 1 is simply MUCH to loud already. We were using the alam clock function of Sonos for years which used a Apple Music Playlist to wake us at Volume 1. Since the 15.2 Update the volume is disturbingly loud and we switched away from playing an Apple Music playlist to playing a radio station instead.

T

thkl

Lyricist III

…. and we switched away….

Sonos should be aware of this, because it's never a good thing when customers will switch away from a beloved solution cause it stop working …. cause maybe in the future the customer will switch away from Sonos ! So I think @Corry P , Sonos should bring back the old behavior before 15.2 maybe as an option for those customers who will maybe “switch away”

O

officier

Lyricist III

My Sonos system was perfect before 15.2 At the very least, let us revert back to a prior firmware. I do not have any Era speakers, nor do I play Atmos through the app, thus being able to go back to 15.2 would work for me.

AirPlay has allowed for volume normalization for me for Apple Music (through Apple’s settings), but AirPlay is buggy and consistently knocks speakers off. Playing Apple Music through the app, like others have stated, the 1% volume of AM is STILL too loud (especially at night), and there needs to be a normalization option for when streaming Spotify and/or Apple Music within the app so we don’t have to rely on shoddy AirPlay.

I do have 2 Era speakers, but still being bothered by the same issue …

L

lcd

Lyricist I

Exactly the same problem here, 1 is too loud and if it was introduced with 15.2 I think it would be possible to reduce the overall volume of Apple Music in an update …

J

jakudo

Enthusiast I

I believe that it shouldn’t be that difficult to change the scale of the volume bar so that the volume level 1 would become 10 (or something) or they might add volume level 0,25 0,5 and 0,75 (or something like that). That would fix the problem very easily. No need to thing about some complex solutions...

D

DazG

Contributor I

Sorry, this cannot be functioning as designed as previously the volume levels were fine, the fact Sonos has tweaked the design and it is now unusable is an appealing position for a company with this many users. The request is simple, fix the scaling of the volume so 1 is barely audible with a smooth transition all the way through.
there should be laws against updating firm or software that renders a device useless for the purpose if was intended. I use my Sonos 1 in the bedroom when going to sleep but it is now useless for this.

please fix this quickly

B

bananica

Lyricist I

I can’t believe this isn’t fixed yet.
To be honest, even before this “update” level 1 was a bit too loud for bedroom before going to sleep listening, now it’s just ridiculous, we don’t really use our bedroom Sonos any more.

Please fix this, I really don’t want to change our home speaker system again.

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