Enthusiast II

Answered

Volume levels too high after 15.2 update

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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

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Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

First big question here is which music service or source are you using.

All my Sonos, 6 kinds, all have nearly inaudible audio at setting 1. Using Amazon or the Music Library.

The issue affects Apple Music which is why you’re not experiencing it.

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Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

I’m not getting this issue (strangely) I have Beam, One Surrounds & Sub Mini in the main bedroom and I ran a test using the dB meter App on an iPhone XR. I played Apple’s ‘Pop in Spatial Audio’ playlist and got the results (as attached screenshots).

The quiet bedroom averaged out at 30dB and the playlist playing on the Beam HT averaged 32dB at 1% volume level. The Beam HT was set at all default settings. My room clock (which I removed from the bedroom prior to test) gives a similar 32dB reading (it’s not that loud either) - so I’m not finding this too loud to listen to at night - in fact I would likely set the music output at a higher volume level to drift off to sleep to and that’s whilst playing on a full HT setup.

The phone that took the reading by the way was positioned approx. 6 feet away from the Beam at the same height as the Beam (middle of bed) and I sleep about 10-11 feet away from the Beam with the surrounds on the two bedside tables.

It would be interesting perhaps to see what readings other people are getting in their rooms, perhaps from their same, or different, Sonos speakers.

I provided readings earlier in the thread to evidence the difference in Apple Music volume, here is some data for 1% volume on one of my Play:One’s. Levels were captured using live listen on my iPhone 12 Pro and Airpod Pros.

I loaded BBC Sounds and turned on Radio 1, the song playing was ‘Freemasons - Love on my Mind’ so I measured the audio and then played the same song from Apple Music.

BBC Sounds: 17dB

Apple Music: 30dB

Whilst I fully appreciate it’s personal preference as to what volume people can withstand for sleeping, in our household no-one can sleep with music blasting at 30dB. When you have been listening to your entire Sonos system for over 10 years at a certain level you really get used to it, only to have that volume level near enough double with a poorly designed update from Sonos.

For reference, to get BBC Sounds to hit the same volume as Apple Music, I had to put the speaker volume on 9%.

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Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

I had a response after emailing the CEO, still not holding out much hope of anything resulting from it but at least it has been acknowledged.

“Thank you so much for reaching out to Sonos Customer Experience. Your initial e-mail and feedback have been shared with our CEO. Patrick, after having read through the description of the situation you have been facing, decided it best to have your case sent over to one of his senior advisors within the the project, for further handling, such that action could be taken immediately.”

However they did then go on to say to disable loudness to help fix it, so the fundemental understanding and impact of the issue is still not hitting home!

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Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

This issue is still not fixed in update 15.10, no updates from the CEO’s senior advisors either.

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Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

Update 15.11 has still not fixed the Apple Music playback volume issue. I also haven’t received any further response from the CEO correspondence.

It’s now 9 months since Sonos introduced this issue and still no sign that they want to fix it.

Ken_Griffiths

Update 15.11 has still not fixed the Apple Music playback volume issue. I also haven’t received any further response from the CEO correspondence.

It’s now 9 months since Sonos introduced this issue and still no sign that they want to fix it.

Maybe see this earlier post in the thread from Sonos Staff…

It’s gone forward as a ‘feature request’, but there’s no saying anything might change here. Sonos never announce their development updates either, looking at other feature requests that have been put forward in the past.

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Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

Update 15.11 has still not fixed the Apple Music playback volume issue. I also haven’t received any further response from the CEO correspondence.

It’s now 9 months since Sonos introduced this issue and still no sign that they want to fix it.

Maybe see this earlier post in the thread from Sonos Staff…

It’s gone forward as a ‘feature request’, but there’s no saying anything might change here. Sonos never announce their development updates either, looking at other feature requests that have been put forward in the past.

I’ve read it, it’s not acceptable (hence why I contacted the CEO and got a response). The issue still exists and I’ll keep updating everyone until the issue is actually fixed.

skullc

Prodigy III

@Tom_69

its one of the reasons why I ditched Apple Music, the gain is set way to high to get decent quality sound even at higher volume levels.

switched to Qobuz and am happier now with the volume control and the quality, I lose atmos and voice control but not bothered by that.

hope this is resolved for you sooner than later

Network= livewire cpe pro 3 +eero 6 pro wireless

Ken_Griffiths

Some thoughts… maybe the App volume-level curve is global and therefore a ‘balancing act’ across all the music services/audio sources that Sonos presently support (and across all their different hardware products too) and that’s why these things are perhaps presently ‘by design’🤔?

Some music services undoubtedly output the various audio sources in different quality and so maybe slightly quieter than others …and adjusting the App volume curve is perhaps a much bigger task than we perhaps realise. It might mean there’s a ‘potential fix’, but the engineering costs to do it, may not justify the work involved, particularly for a minority of users that seem to experience this issue with Apple Music on their particular model/combination of Sonos speakers. A case of.. ‘You can’t please all the people, all of the time’.

As I outlined earlier in this thread, I do not notice the issue on a Beam HT setup in our main bedroom and the Wife and I subscribe to Apple Music, Amazon Music and use many other music services too via the Sonos App …and Apple Music is not significantly louder than the other services at 1% volume-level. That said, we don’t sit within a couple of feet of the HT speakers anyway to be concerned by the volume at that 1% low level.

If a fix is forthcoming maybe it needs to come from the Apple side of things to reduce the potential cost of re-engineering the Sonos software/hardware controls too.

All speculation of course, but my other thought is if Sonos do change this in response to the acknowledged "feature request” - then the Staff who frequent this user-community will likely announce it in this thread anyway, proximate to any Sonos firmware/app update.

P

PL13

Lyricist I

Maybe the only solution is to all of us move away from Apple Music to Spotify ? Like all of you I cannot work anymore with volume set to 1 in the whole house (using 12 Sonos products). Another solution might be to sell Sonos products and to buy newer and better equipment from other sound manufacturers. The only sure thing is that staying as is = not the solution. I will evaluate my options and decide what I will remove to solve this key issue.

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