Jada Jones / ZDNET
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**ZDNET’s Key Takeaways**
The configuration and arrangement of your listening space can have an extraordinary influence on how effectively your soundbar reproduces Dolby Atmos audio. Even small variations in the room’s shape and furnishing can alter the perception of spatial sound. Additionally, a range of specialized audio features exists to refine voice intelligibility, ensuring that dialogue cuts cleanly through complex soundscapes. Expanding your Sonos home theater system—by integrating compatible devices such as subwoofers and satellite speakers—can significantly enhance not only the clarity of your audio but also its overall stability and dynamic presence.

While Sonos product pages and popular online reviews devote considerable attention to technical specifications—covering everything from bitrates to driver composition—in real-world scenarios, the environment of your room often exerts a greater impact on actual listening quality. Critical factors include where the soundbar is positioned, the format of the content you stream or play, and even the dimensions and textures of your room, such as whether it contains carpets, curtains, or reflective surfaces. Each of these elements can subtly shape your soundbar’s output, sometimes more dramatically than the listed specs would lead you to expect.

From personal experience, I rely daily on my Sonos Arc and Arc Ultra soundbars, complemented by Era 300 speakers, a Sub 4 subwoofer, and the Ace headphones. Despite the impressive technology inherent in each device, achieving a consistently satisfying sonic environment required numerous small adjustments and iterative refinements. Having fine-tuned these details, I am now ready to share the key insights that transformed my setup.

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### 1. Problem: Dolby Atmos Lacks Immersion
**The Reason: Insufficient Height Dimension**
Dolby Atmos operates as an object-based spatial audio format, designed to place individual sound sources within a three-dimensional field. In commercial theaters, the sense of enveloping realism is achieved through ceiling-mounted speakers that deliver precise overhead cues. In contrast, most home environments lack such ceiling speakers, which means the immersive depth relies entirely on the soundbar’s capacity to emulate that vertical dimension. Both the Sonos Arc and Arc Ultra incorporate upward-firing speaker arrays specifically engineered to bounce audio off your ceiling, creating the illusion of height and surrounding depth.

**The Fix: Increase Height Channel Volume**
This adjustment represents one of the most intricate to get right. Rooms with high or vaulted ceilings, or setups where the soundbar sits too close beneath the television, tend to diminish the effect of the upfiring drivers. In such scenarios, boosting the height-channel volume within the Sonos app can help these overhead effects become more perceptible and lifelike. The emerging Era 300 model, in particular, excels in medium-to-large spaces where its built-in upfiring tweeter can interact efficiently with ceiling reflections, enriching the upward audio projection and broadening the horizontal soundstage simultaneously. For those whose rooms can accommodate it, pairing a set of rear Era 300s provides a dramatically more immersive Dolby Atmos experience, surrounding the listener with a precisely defined acoustic panorama.

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It is worth noting that the compact Sonos Ray and Beam (Gen 2) models forgo dedicated upfiring speakers. Nonetheless, their front- and side-firing channels still manage to project an expansive soundstage, noticeably surpassing the thin, directionally limited speakers built into most televisions. Among smaller soundbars, the Beam (Gen 2) stands out as the ideal balance between size, affordability, and audio breadth—especially when you find it discounted.

### 2. Problem: Dialogue Lacks Clarity
**The Reason: Audio Mode Settings Require Adjustment**
Several built-in features can be tailored to emphasize speech and maintain crispness across a variety of content types. Begin with the Speech Enhancement mode, which subtly reduces low-end frequencies while amplifying the midrange tones where human dialogue naturally resides. Enabling this mode can instantly help voices emerge from dense background mixes. To further tame overpowering bass or rumbling effects—particularly useful for late-night viewing—activate the Night Mode alongside Speech Enhancement. Additionally, verify that the Loudness option is switched off, since this feature tends to emphasize full-spectrum intensity and can inadvertently elevate non-dialogue sounds such as explosions or musical scores.

If voices still seem buried, venture into the equalizer (EQ) controls within the Sonos application. Try a modest reduction of bass response to lighten the overall tonal balance and help the clarity shine through. These options allow you to sculpt your sound output efficiently without introducing distortion or fatigue.

In my own setup, adding rear speakers and especially a dedicated subwoofer transformed dialogue intelligibility completely. Offloading the deep bass frequencies to the sub allows the soundbar to concentrate on the midrange spectrum, freeing it to reproduce speech with greater precision and articulation. The result is a cinematic yet conversational listening profile.

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For those fully integrated within the Sonos ecosystem who wish to watch television or movies privately—without disturbing family or neighbors—the Sonos Ace headphones provide a seamless solution. These headphones maintain compatibility with major Sonos soundbars, including the Arc, Arc Ultra, Beam, and Ray, mirroring the soundbar’s audio format while isolating the listener in a personal, high-fidelity sound field.

### 3. Problem: Overall Sound Feels Slightly Off
**The Fix: Recalibrate Using TruePlay**
TruePlay serves as Sonos’s proprietary acoustic calibration system, developed to optimize speaker performance by analyzing the acoustic quirks of your individual space. Real living rooms rarely resemble the tidy, symmetrical demo environments portrayed on product pages. Instead, most households feature irregular dimensions, diverse materials, and varying furniture densities that can distort how sound interacts with the walls, ceiling, and floor.

By performing a thorough TruePlay tuning, you enable the system to detect and compensate for these environmental effects—adjusting frequency balance so your speakers sound precisely as intended by their design engineers. This process measures how audio reflects from nearby barriers, such as sectional couches, shelving units, and even coffee tables, then subtly refines playback to maintain tonal equilibrium throughout the listening zone.

Whenever you rearrange the layout—whether by shifting furniture, altering wall décor, or moving the soundbar itself—running a new TruePlay calibration ensures your setup continues to deliver accurate performance. Think of it as recalibrating an instrument: a brief procedure that restores harmony between the technology and its surroundings, ensuring your Sonos equipment always performs at its acoustic peak.

Sourse: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sonos-soundbars-tweaks-improve-performance/