Should I turn on “Loudness” in EQ setting when using your suggested bass and treble settings?

Jan 08, 2024 09:07 AM By RtingsUser9916173

2

Should I turn on “Loudness” in EQ setting when using your suggested bass and treble settings?

We kept this feature off when we performed our tests. Of course, you can always see if you like it on yourself—how we experience sound can be subjective, and factors like the shape and size of your room can impact what’s best for you.

Jan 09, 2024 01:42 PM By  Becca Fischer

We kept this feature off when we performed our tests. Of course, you can always see if you like it on yourself—how we experience sound can be subjective, and factors like the shape and size of your room can impact what’s best for you.

Thanks. I found that when the loudness option is turned off, the human voice in songs is clearer.

Hey have a couple of probably silly questions. Would the suggested bass and treble settings still apply after using trueplay? Have added rear symfonisk speakers, would doing this affect bass and treble settings or unrelated? Thanks,

Jan 13, 2024 04:57 AM By RtingsUser3808586

2

Hey have a couple of probably silly questions. Would the suggested bass and treble settings still apply after using trueplay? Have added rear symfonisk speakers, would doing this affect bass and treble settings or unrelated? Thanks,

Not a silly question at all! We actually perform all our sound tests with Trueplay turned on, since we figure that’s how most users will want to set up their soundbar. So, yes, these suggested settings definitely apply with it on.

We haven’t tested this bar with the Symfonisk speakers, but you might be interested to see how it performs with the One SL speakers at our review linked here. Interestingly, we found that the same bass and treble settings applied. You can always play around with it yourself to see if you prefer a slightly different sound, since factors like the shape and size of your living room can impact how you perceive sound.

Hope this helps!

Jan 19, 2024 10:48 AM By  Becca Fischer

Not a silly question at all! We actually perform all our sound tests with Trueplay turned on, since we figure that’s how most users will want to set up their soundbar. So, yes, these suggested settings definitely apply with it on. We haven’t tested this bar with the Symfonisk speakers, but you might be interested to see how it performs with the One SL speakers at our review linked here. Interestingly, we found that the same bass and treble settings applied. You can always play around with it yourself to see if you prefer a slightly different sound, since factors like the shape and size of your living room can impact how you perceive sound. Hope this helps!

Brilliant thankyou. Also would you have speech enhancement on or off?

Jan 19, 2024 11:12 AM By RtingsUser3808586

2

Brilliant thankyou. Also would you have speech enhancement on or off?

We tested with speech enhancement off. Again though, it’s a good idea to test it out yourself to see whether you like it!

Hello Team!

Thanks for a great review! I bought the sound bar based on your review! I love it, but it has been very challenging to connect it to my PC, since it doesnt have a Optical port on my MB, I bought a switch with optical to HDMI, but I cant sem to make the sound come out, the PC detects it with NVIDIA control pannel but no sound comes out. do you have any suggestions? Thank you!

its overly generous for such ratings. i own the beam gen 2, sub gen 3 and the sonos one pair. the best part of it is the ability to stream music over iphone/ipad airplay. the sound quality seriously does not match the price. its worst than my 15 years old altec lansing. thumbs down.

You rate optical audio latency as better than ARC latency, but the optical latency value is higher than that for ARC. Seems counterintuitive. What am I missing?

Jan 03, 2025 09:41 AM By Puzzler

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You rate optical audio latency as better than ARC latency, but the optical latency value is higher than that for ARC. Seems counterintuitive. What am I missing?

Hey there! You’re right about the scoring looking a bit wonky if you directly compare the latency figures between Optical and eARC. However, the reason they look counterintuitive is that the thresholds for the scoring are a little different between Optical and ARC latency scores.

To give you an idea, for Optical connections, the thresholds for a 7.5 score (which we considered to be ‘good’) are 325ms with Dolby Digital and 110ms for PCM 2.0. (To be clear, you’d probably need to adjust the AV Sync with a 325ms latency, but Optical with Dolby Digital isn’t exactly cutting-edge technology at this point, so the scores reflect reasonable expectations for the older technology.) In contrast, the expectations over HDMI are lower latency because it’s a newer and faster technology. For instance, Dolby Digital’s threshold for a 7.5 score is 105ms, and PCM 2.0’s threshold is 70ms.

On top of this difference in expectations between the two connections and audio formats, there’s the weighting and distribution to consider. If you hover the cursor over the ‘?’ next to the score for each box, it shows you the breakdown of the weighting used to comprise the total score for that section. Hopefully, this helps to relieve your confusion a bit!

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 suffers from an issue where surround content sometimes sounds metallic/distorted/echoey. This has been documented in multiple places like Reddit, and Sonos has also acknowledged the issue affects “Some Beam Gen 2 soundbars” and its engineers are working on a fix (according to a chat transcript with a Sonos support representative on April 8, 2025), though this has been an issue for well over a year now. They recommend using the optical adapter in the mean time, instead of HDMI ARC/eARC … which seems like a very poor work around, and it’s not clear this will actually solve the issue, either. Changing input audio to the soundbar/TV output audio to stereo PCM fixes the issue, but then of course you lose multichannel audio. Until this is fixed, I’m not sure Rtings should have this in their list of best small soundbars.

Apr 08, 2025 10:53 AM By jonifyme

8

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 suffers from an issue where surround content sometimes sounds metallic/distorted/echoey. This has been documented in multiple places like Reddit, and Sonos has also acknowledged the issue affects “Some Beam Gen 2 soundbars” and its engineers are working on a fix (according to a chat transcript with a Sonos support representative on April 8, 2025), though this has been an issue for well over a year now. They recommend using the optical adapter in the mean time, instead of HDMI ARC/eARC … which seems like a very poor work around, and it’s not clear this will actually solve the issue, either. Changing input audio to the soundbar/TV output audio to stereo PCM fixes the issue, but then of course you lose multichannel audio. Until this is fixed, I’m not sure Rtings should have this in their list of best small soundbars.

Hey, We’re going to look into this with a retest. Can you give a specific example of surround content with which you’ve noticed this issue and it was very noticeable, so we can attempt to replicate it?

It might take us a little bit of extra time because we’re juggling a lot of testing with some limited resources right now. But, thank you for bringing the concern to our attention, and we’ll take a look!