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Hi All,

I’m considering getting a sonos soundbar, but have a couple of questions.  I currently have an old Yamaha YSP2200 Sound Projector.  It’s a reasonable (if old) piece of kit, but it’s just so complex and has so many settings and i’m looking for something simpler.  The frustration with it is that it’s really better for a nice perfectly shaped room with a setup against the flat part of the wall in the middle.

Therfore I have 2 hopefully simple questions..

  1.  It’s a medium sized lounge (certainly not big), but the TV is in the corner.  Is the ARCs ATMOS setup a little lost on a lounge format in this way or would the BEAM be good enough.  In other words am i diminishing the benefit of the ARC so may as well get the BEAM.  it seemed that way with the yamaha.
  2. Either way (from what i understand), you still do the trueplay setup.  With the yamaha, and it looks like it’s the same here, you set it up for a single seating position.  This means the result would vary if you were sitting in different places on two separate couches in an L shape in the opposite corner to the TV.  With the Yamaha this seemed the case again, but not sure how it affects the outcome of tuning with the BEAM or ARC.  Can you advise how you setup either system with multiple seating positions?

Really appreciate any help to get my head around this.

Please assume that from a TV perspective I have it covered with eARC etc..

 

Thanks,

Mike

Hi @MikeDV, 

Welcome to the Sonos community and thanks for reaching out to us. Let me share some information to help you out. 

All of our home theater products, including Arc, were designed to be used with TVs. That said, some projectors may be compatible if they support HDMI ARC, eARC, or Optical. In placing the Sonos Arc, it requires a minimum of 5.5 inches on the front and sides of it, with at least 2 inches between the backside of Arc and the TV when in a tabletop orientation. If wall-mounting, it is recommended to have a clearance of at least 5.5 inches between the TV and Arc. 
The audio will affect your Arc placement but you can tune your Sonos speakers with Trueplay. Trueplay measures how sound reflects off walls, furnishings, and other surfaces in a room, then fine-tunes your Sonos speaker to make sure it sounds great no matter where you've placed it. You can also adjust the balance and loudness of your speakers in the Sonos app.
We can wait for suggestions and feedback from our Sonos community members, they might provide their opinion about this. You can also reach out to our sales team through phone or email where you can send the image and your floor plan for assessment and to provide you the best option. Please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns, I'll be glad to assist you. 

It’s a sound projector i’m replacing, not an image projector.

My 2 questions still stand though, as the answer above doesn’t answer whether Beam or Arc is affected or limited by a corner TV configuration, or how you tune it for 2 seating positions.  The setup instructions i’ve seen talk about a single seating position for part of the set up.

 

Cheers,
Mike

I have to assume you’ve never done the TruePlay process with a Sonos. Based on your description, it isn’t like the one Yamaha uses. 

You don’t do it for a specific seating position, but for the room, by walking around and waving the iOS device throughout the space. 

In my opinion, TruePlay can help in some situations, but there’s a limit as to what it can alter in the sound field. It’s not a silver bullet that fixes all poor placement decisions. 

 

Hi,


Thanks for your response.  I am familiar with trueplay for the sonos one, but the setup and tuning appears to be different for Arc for example, where it seems to be a two stage process.  The first balancing the speakers for a seating position, and the second stage which appears like the normal room based tuning..  I saw this in an example video here (starting at the 2 stage process): 

 

So i’m keen to know this kind of tuning would affect the sound in a family setup with people seated around the room.  do you skip tuning?

 

Also, if i’m left with a poor placement as i need to have the TV in the corner, does this negate some of the Arc advantages and I may as well save some cash with a beam as it’s not a huge room.

 

Cheers,

Mike

 

I have, currently, skipped tuning one Arc, in that room, I’ve found that my speaker placement is sufficient to not change the output of the Sonos. I may do it at some point, if only to get rid of the nag dot in the controller, when I look at it, which is infrequently. 

However, as to whether your placement would be a challenge, I’m not an audio engineer, and am not sure. From what I do know about physics from high school, I can’t imagine a corner placement would be ideal, but it boils down to not only the simple physics of the corner, but also all of the other things with various surfaces in the room. Only you can make the determination if it sounds good to you, it really isn’t possible for someone else to get in to your head and use your ears. 

If I were you, I’d purchase from Sonos, which would allow you the opportunity to test yourself, and see if it matches your expectations, and return it if it doesn’t. 

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