5 ways to make Sonos speakers sound even better

Sonos speakers and soundbars deliver a fantastic out-of-the-box experience. But while they sound pretty good right away, even as part of our best Bluetooth speakers and soundbars, they still need a few tweaks to make sure they perform best in your particular environment.

Fortunately, the powerful Sonos control app offers plenty of ways to tailor the sound of its speakers and soundbars to your liking, and optimize the output to your room for a more engaging and thoroughly entertaining audio performance. , no matter what kind of music or movies you listen to. enjoy.

To get the most out of your Sonos speakers or soundbar, be sure to try the oft-overlooked features below to optimize and improve your Sonos speakers and get sound that’s right for you.

Sonos speakers

If you own or are planning to buy a Sonos One, Five, Sonos Move or Sonos Roam speaker, here are the steps to follow:

1. Use Sonos Trueplay

In the world of Hi-Fi, placing loudspeakers without surrounding walls is essential for the best sound – frequencies that are too close and low can quickly become too powerful, while high frequencies can be affected by reflections on nearby walls.

In practice, however, not all of us have the free space to position our speakers for best performance, so Sonos has developed its Trueplay calibration tool to tackle variations in placement to optimize sound. from its speaker for best performance no matter where they are positioned. .

What is TruePlay Tuning?
Trueplay is a speaker calibration process that uses your phone’s microphone to adjust the audio output of your Sonos speakers to your space for the best sound performance across the entire frequency range than the speaker. speaker can produce. It is recommended that you “re-tune” your speaker with Trueplay whenever you change your room layout. Speaker placement, room size, and room furniture absorption can all impact the sound delivery of any speaker, and Trueplay is a remarkably effective way to answer all of them. the acoustic problems of the room without having to worry about the best placement of the loudspeakers.

Once you’ve chosen the Sonos speaker you want to tune to the room it’s placed in, go to the Sonos S2 app on your device and select the Gear wheel adjustment. From here select the System then tab select the speaker you want to tune to from the Some products listing. Scroll down at Sound and select true gamethen Adjust (Where Retune).

The S2 app will guide you through the Trueplay Room Tuning process and there’s a short, skippable video on the process of calibrating Sonos speakers to their environment.

The process takes about 60 seconds. Once done and the sound from the speakers is calibrated for your room, you can toggle the settings on or off to decide if you like the sound changes. If you are not completely convinced that the new settings are right for your room, you can repeat the process again and as often as necessary to achieve a sound optimization that suits you.

2. Adjust Sonos EQ and Balance controls

Whether or not you decide to use Trueplay’s Room Calibration settings, there are still plenty of ways to tweak the sound of your speaker or soundbar to your liking using tweaks. of the equalizer.

Again, go to the Sonos app on your device and select the Gear wheel adjustment. Of the select the System tab and then select the speaker of the Some products listing. Scroll down to Sound option and select Equalizer.

The sound of all Sonos products can be customized via a two-band equalizer, which independently controls the level of low frequencies (bass) and treble frequencies (high). The control level goes through +/- 10 for each band, ‘0’ being ‘flat’. These controls are useful for achieving a sound balance that you enjoy listening to with your own music, whether you opt for the Trueplay option or not.

Point: Select one of your favorite tracks and adjust the bass and treble sliders until you get a sound you like.

Additionally, if you have two speakers paired in stereo or are using a single Sonos Five in stereo mode, for example, adjusting the balance allows you to adapt the relative sound level between the left and right speakers .

3. Optimize with Sonos Loudness Control

Many people expect their speakers or soundbar to perform equally well regardless of the volume level of their speaker. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and the tonal balance can change depending on the speaker volume. Luckily, the Sonos control app has a Loudness option that offers tonal enhancement, which is particularly effective at low volumes.

To try Loudness, go to the Sonos app on your device and select the Gear wheel adjustment. From there, select the System Tab so what select your loudspeaker Some products listing. Scroll down at Sound so what select equalizer. Next scroll down down and select Intensity.

Why do we need volume controls?
Essentially, at low volume, our hearing is less sensitive to low and high frequencies. With Sonos Loudness mode selected at low volume, these frequencies are boosted so listeners can hear a full range of frequencies at levels proportional to each other. Without Loudness enabled, music sounds thin and bad due to a lack of low-frequency energy that comes from driving the speaker at low volumes.

Sonos soundbars

While all of the commands mentioned above also apply to its soundbars, there are a few additional commands that you may not be aware of that are designed for owners of Sonos Ray, Sonos Beam, and Sonos soundbars. Arc, as well as for the Sonos Amp.

4. Enable Sonos Speech and Night Sound enhancement

We’ve always found the voice quality of Sonos soundbars to be quite strong, and even the recently introduced entry-level Sonos Ray soundbar impressed us with the clarity of its dialogue. But if you’re having trouble hearing dialogue in movies or TV shows, dive into the Sonos app and find the speech enhancement feature.

Press the System icon (the middle one with four vertical bars) at the bottom of the S2 app home screen. Select the sound bar speaker or amp, then faucet the speech enhancement (represented by a bubble) to enable or disable speech enhancement mode.

With the mode enabled, it manages to improve speech clarity without affecting the overall tone too much. This is especially useful for TV series with mumbled dialogue and for anyone who is hard of hearing.

night sound
This is handy for those who watch late-night TV but don’t want to disturb sleeping housemates or nearby neighbors, for example. When watching high-octane movies, for example, Night Sound reduces the intensity of the loudest parts of a movie or TV program while increasing the clarity of dialogue so you can hear everything which is said, even at low volume.

As for speech enhancement, open System tongue, select your soundbar or amp, then faucet the moon icon to enable or disable night sound.

5. Enable Sonos TV Dialog Sync

One of my favorite features of the Sonos S2 app is the TV Dialog Sync slider. This is really handy if you notice lip-syncing issues (where the dialog is ahead of the picture), which can often happen when hopping between content providers such as channel catch-up services TV channels and movie streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

From Settings gear wheel tongue, press System. Select your sound system sound bar Where amp. Scroll down at Home theater and tap TV Dialog Sync. Move the slider to the right to delay the audio until it is synchronized with the video.

Warning: tinkering with this feature may be annoying to other viewers if you decide to do it during their favorite movie.

Point: A common cause of this issue is an audio setting on the TV or an external source device that processes the audio before it gets to Sonos, causing it to be delayed. Check the audio output settings of your TV and any external source device.