Sonos fixes issue that causes Dolby Atmos soundbars to make loud popping noises

Sonos has resolved an issue that could cause Arc and Beam (Gen 2) soundbars to sometimes suddenly make loud “pop” or banging noises when using Dolby MAT, Atmos over HDMI. The problem seems to have been going on for years.

Sonos late on its support forum know that a solution for the pop sound has been found, and that a fix was made available to all customers on Thursday. The company claims that a ‘rare bug’ is the cause of the problem. This could cause the Dolby MAT decoder to play audibly damaged audio segments, which sound like pop sounds, while they are normally filtered by the device. Sonos states that it has now improved the decoder so that this corrupt audio data is better filtered out.

The post Sonos is responding to is almost three years old and has more than 1,000 comments, full of users claiming to be experiencing the same problem. Also Tom Warren of The Verge reported last August suddenly hear the same loud banging sounds when he uses Dolby Atmos with his Arc soundbar. At the time, Sonos announced that it had not yet been able to reproduce the problems reliably and therefore could not yet release a fix.

Sonos’ $900 Dolby Atmos soundbar has a loud pop issue with the Xbox Series X and Apple TV 4K that’s taking years to fix. This is what it sounds like. More information right here: pic.twitter.com/1kLLJzSTt9

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) August 10, 2023