Turn on the Speech Enhancement on the Sonos App and Night Mode.Hook the optical from the splitter into the Playbar.
Hook your AppleTV (which doesn’t have an optical out) and any other devices (BluRay, etc.) into the splitter.Buy an HDMI splitter with an audio optical out, like this one.
I had the TV correctly configured to bypass any audio processing and it was only shunting the audio out to the optical port. I had them plugged into my Samsung 4k Smart TV and I had the optical audio connected from the TV to the Sonos Playbar. If you have a receiver it’s probably a safe bet your signal is clean, but like most people, I just have a TV and a bunch of HDMI inputs. You need to bypass any potential pre-processing that might happen to the audio signal. It’s kind of surprising when you start seeing threads like this one where there’s dozens of people complaining for years, with no real response / solution. The sound you get from the Playbar (and two Play 1s for surround sound) is great for music, but the results I’ve had regarding speech during movies have absolutely sucked. Modern flat screen TVs really exacerbate this issue as their speakers aren’t great anyway, let alone for pushing out a nice clean speech channel. My hearing seems fine overall (famous last words I guess), just differentiating speech within noisy backdrops is annoying. Probably due to over-exposure to loud music from playing in rock bands through highschool and college, I really struggle to hear conversation in noisy environments like pubs, and this issue extends to hearing speech in movies unless I’ve got a dedicated speech channel.
Posted in Life, Music Tagged Music, records, Sonos, vinyl How to Solve Sonos Playbar Speech Issues with the Apple TVĪ couple months ago, I purchased a Sonos Playbar to replace a Bluetooth Samsung Soundbar I had, as I wanted to integrate the living room audio setup with the rest of my house, which is all Sonos. Just like what happened to TiVo. It’s sad, really, but when your latest big feature (Alexa integration) takes you more than a year to ship AND it’s completely terrible, you kind of deserve it. I don’t see them pulling out their tailspin anytime soon and Google, Apple, and a bunch of other companies will be eating their lunch over the next 2-3 years. Their hardware is great, their idea was revolutionary and visionary when they launched, but they’ve spent years coasting and delivering crummy software. Sonos is my nominee for “company most likely to become like TiVo and squander a massive opportunity”.
I know I’m late to the party, but I’m glad I finally made it!
But I now have a new avenue for music, and it was something that’s been missing. I still listen to playlists and radio stations my massive digital music collection while I’m walking, working, and running around the house. Back then I would spend hours listening to music and intently study every piece of art and lyric that came with a new CD. The point is, the last couple of weeks I’ve sat down, dimmed the lights in the living room, put on a record, and experienced the album and artist in a way I haven’t since I was in high school. I also don’t care about audio quality that much either, and I’m not going to pretend that records sound better or that they’re warmer or any of the other stuff Vinyl Geeks will obsess over – that’s not the point. Nothing fancy, and I’ve committed the sacrilege of hooking it up to my Sonos system which would horrify any analog purist, but I don’t care. I missed the experience of looking at the album artwork and liner notes (remember that?) and focusing on music the way the artist intended. But here I was guilty of not having listened to a complete album in over a year. One of my personal policies with the iTunes Store over the years was I would always buy the entire album of an artist. Apple debate) are the variety of radio stations and the playlist discovery, but I realised (after a year of listening to way more music than I’d ever managed before) that I’d gravitated to this almost anonymous way of interacting with artists, albums, and music. One of my favourite features of Apple Music (yes, lets not get into the Spotify vs. While it sounds incredibly cheesy, it really did help me fall in love with music again – I could listen while walking around the flat, working on something not in front of a computer, cooking, etc. It had been more than 15 years since I’d had a stereo of any kind, and while I’d enjoyed being able to carry around my music collection on my phone for years, I never really listened to music at home, unless I was in front of a computer. About a year ago, I put a Sonos sound system in my flat.