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

N

Neksio

Lyricist III

How ironic, I just got 3 months free of Apple Music from Sonos when I bought two new Era 100 speakers… and now it does not work properly. Even at volume = 1, getting complaints from the family :(

Do you mean the voice-control volume-1 level, or actual volume-1 in the Sonos App, as the two are entirely different volume levels - I struggle to hear volume-1 in the Sonos App at say a distance of 5-6 feet in a quiet room. Anyone in another room would never hear it in our Home.

The Alexa voice assistant (just as an example) works in integer numbers, each representing a volume increase/decrease of 10%.

My tests from post before (Sonos and Echo are siting on the same shelf)

“Did some tests yesterday - the same track and my very unprofessional dB meter:
Sonos (Apple Music API mode) at the LOWEST possible volume 1/100 is roughly equivalent of Alexa at volume 16/100.”

P.S. It is possible to use voice to fine tune Alexa Echo volume by 1% (not default 10%) - not easy and a require some work but then works fine (EACH volume level require separate routine)

T

Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

Decided to do some more tests utilising live listen dB meter on my iPhone with AirPod Pros.

Stood about 1 meter away from a Play 1 speaker in a silent house, the in-person difference with Apple Music is still very stark and obvious which is backed up by the results. I didn’t pick any particular tracks, I just played the Top Hits playlist from Apple Music, Charts Top 50 playlist in Soundcloud and whatever music was playing on Radio 1 BBC Sounds.

For reference, we have used volume setting 15 for many years on all of our Sonos alarms to give a nice background music volume in our house and also used (until Sonos broke it) volume setting 1 in the bedrooms at night.

Sonos volume set to 15

Apple Music 52 dB
BBC Sounds 37 dB
SoundCloud 36 dB

Sonos volume set to 1

Apple Music 29 dB
BBC Sounds 16 dB

Cannot wait until they fix this as the experience since it’s been broken has been terrible, especially losing the ability to play music at night in bedrooms.

O

outteach

Lyricist I

Same issue for me for at least a couple of months now.

C

codeman318

Lyricist III

Still no resolution for this.

I ended up chatting in with Sonos support who ran diagnostics and their advice was for me to go through my Apple Music library of thousands upon thousands of songs and delete the files that I've added manually over the years (I began curating a library in 2003) that are .mp3 files and were uploaded (some were not matched) to AM upon subscribing and delete them and redownload/add the Apple Music (AAC) files – not to mention risking losing those songs if I ever chose to unsubscribe to AM.

I LITERALLY played the same song (my .mp3 variant that was uploaded and not matched AND the Apple Music version) and there is an extreme difference in the volume levels. Yes, I will obviously replace my .mp3 variant of this song with the AM variant, but this should not be the fix that users must audit their libraries for songs with volume inconsistencies. There was NO issue with 15.2 and prior.

If they can’t pinpoint this, they need to introduce a “sound check” feature or similar for the system.

I am SO tired of having to use AirPlay (which sucks) to listen to my AM library.

N

Neksio

Lyricist III

Still no resolution for this.

I ended up chatting in with Sonos support who ran diagnostics and their advice was for me to go through my Apple Music library of thousands upon thousands of songs and delete the files that I've added manually over the years (I began curating a library in 2003) that are .mp3 files and were uploaded (some were not matched) to AM upon subscribing and delete them and redownload/add the Apple Music (AAC) files – not to mention risking losing those songs if I ever chose to unsubscribe to AM.

I LITERALLY played the same song (my .mp3 variant that was uploaded and not matched AND the Apple Music version) and there is an extreme difference in the volume levels. Yes, I will obviously replace my .mp3 variant of this song with the AM variant, but this should not be the fix that users must audit their libraries for songs with volume inconsistencies. There was NO issue with 15.2 and prior.

If they can’t pinpoint this, they need to introduce a “sound check” feature or similar for the system.

I am SO tired of having to use AirPlay (which sucks) to listen to my AM library.

What about uploaded mp3 files without an AAC version? Do they propose any solution? I had bought albums from an old Google Play Music and they had only mp3 for download.. (and for some there are NO Apple Music Album at all - for example soundtrack for Transformers - Age of Extinction: GM had a single and an album, AM have only a single)

There are a LOT of albums which don’t have an Apple Music version/match at all..

T

Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

Still not fixed in update 15.6.

T

Tom_69Author

Enthusiast II

Still no resolution for this.

I ended up chatting in with Sonos support who ran diagnostics and their advice was for me to go through my Apple Music library of thousands upon thousands of songs and delete the files that I've added manually over the years (I began curating a library in 2003) that are .mp3 files and were uploaded (some were not matched) to AM upon subscribing and delete them and redownload/add the Apple Music (AAC) files – not to mention risking losing those songs if I ever chose to unsubscribe to AM.

I LITERALLY played the same song (my .mp3 variant that was uploaded and not matched AND the Apple Music version) and there is an extreme difference in the volume levels. Yes, I will obviously replace my .mp3 variant of this song with the AM variant, but this should not be the fix that users must audit their libraries for songs with volume inconsistencies. There was NO issue with 15.2 and prior.

If they can’t pinpoint this, they need to introduce a “sound check” feature or similar for the system.

I am SO tired of having to use AirPlay (which sucks) to listen to my AM library.

All of my music is native Apple Music so it has nothing to do with any manually added tracks. They literally have no clue and it’s a joke.