Owners of the Sonos Arc soundbar have complained about loud popping sounds since late 2020. The company has acknowledged the issue, which it is looking into.
The loud popping sounds occur when sending Dolby Atmos from specific devices. It appears to happen primarily with Apple TV 4K and Xbox Series X, two of the only devices that transmit Dolby Atmos over HDMI as uncompressed PCM with metadata (Dolby MAT 2.0) instead of a compressed bitstream.
Also read: Guide to Dolby Atmos at home
Sonos has been telling users that a workaround is to disable HDMI CEC (and lose HDMI control) or disable Dolby Atmos (and live with 5.1). Neither is an acceptable solution, of course.
Sonos acknowledges issue
The issue does not appear to affect all owners but hundreds of owners have been complaining about the issue for more than two and a half years, and Sonos has still not provided a fix.
The company issued the following statement to The Verge:
We are aware that a small percentage of customers have experienced an interoperability issue which is causing a popping sound on Arc. What we know now is that this issue occurs on some Dolby Atmos enabled audio products, including Arc, when connected to certain combinations of streaming devices and TVs while playing Dolby Atmos content.
We are committed to finding the root cause and we’re continuing to test for a reliable reproduction of what customers are describing online and in conversations with our support team. We are also engaging our contacts at third party manufacturers to further explore possible solutions. As this is an issue stemming from the way various devices are working together, there are a range of tests our team needs to conduct to understand the scope and develop a targeted solution for each setup. We’ll let you know as soon as we have an update to share.
- Source: The Verge, Sonos Community
