True Dolby Atmos

Hello @06Dame, welcome to Sonos Community!

I’ve marked this thread as a feature request and forwarded it to the relevant teams for consideration.

Thank you for the feedback and the interesting ideas.

Adding more speakers isn’t always a good thing.  Adding more speakers to a home theatre setup increases the risk that the wireless connection between the speakers will be less reliable, and Sonos would need to develop proper tuning for that option. That’s a lot of costs that probably won’t appeal to a lot of customers. 

Considering the Era 300s are spatial audio, where you add them to a home theatre setup if not the rear (or front)?  If you use Era 300s, with side firing and upfiring speakers, what’s the point of having separate speakers for the sides and ceiling?  Also, if a person has the budget to do wired ceiling speakers and  speakers in front, side, back, etc, why wouldn’t they just use a traditional wired setup?

Dual subs and Fives doesn't appeal to the masses either, but they have that option  I would add the in ceiling speakers to my current setup, secondary add the ERA 300's wall mounted in their upside down orientation. It's a different use case for everyone. If it can support 32 speakers throughout your home, why not the amount that would give a true dobly Atmos setup. I feel like music is there main objective, movies and TV are secondary. 

Disagree regarding the size of the market, but regardless, sending the same audio signal to a 2nd sub, or using Fives as surrounds instead of other speaker options, is a lot less development and a lot more stable than additional additional sound channels to the home theatre setup.

Wouldn’t the ceiling speakers and upside down Era 300s be playing essentially the same audio channels?  Yes, atmos is not audio channels, but position locations, but I can’t see that you really get improved audio from more speakers playing the same audio.  Maybe if you placed the ceiling speakers more towards the front, but that would be duplicating what the Arc/Beam is doing already.  And again, Sonos would need to tune to your specific case.

Sonos rooms communicate with each other via 2.4 GHz with a 75 mHz delay for buffering reasons.  Because the delay is a killer in home theatre since the audio needs to match the video, Sonos communicates via a private 5 GHz network, which is faster but with limited range.   Obviously, you also have a higher risk of drop outs when you are including more speakers playing different audio streams that the Arc would need to send audio too.

But yes, Sonos is/was primarily a wireless multiroom audio company, although wireless home theatre seems to be pretty much right up there these days.  As I said before, seems rather reasonable to me to cater to the major demographics that want a more basic wireless setup, then try and compete with wired setups with 5 + speakers and such.

At one time I thought that Sonos would maybe add side speakers, but the Era 300 shows that they would rather go with using audio reflections rather than acutal speakers.  I do think they will eventually have an option with 2 separate speakers in the front for TV audio, but likely not with a soundbar in the middle, and more motivated for spatial music than TV.

I would assume that adding the in ceiling speakers (4x) or the ERA 300's wall mounted behind the seating area would be designated as the height channels vs the ear levels.  Something I would think the app/Trueplay would balance out the sound.