A 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.
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. My hearing seems fine overall (famous last words I guess), just differentiating speech within noisy backdrops is annoying. 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.
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. 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.
Here’s how to solve this situation:
You need to bypass any potential pre-processing that might happen to the audio signal.
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. I had them plugged into my Samsung 4k Smart TV and I had the optical audio connected from the TV to the Sonos Playbar. I had the TV correctly configured to bypass any audio processing and it was only shunting the audio out to the optical port. Except it wasn’t.
To inexpensively solve this issue:
- Buy an HDMI splitter with an audio optical out, like this one.
- Hook your AppleTV (which doesn’t have an optical out) and any other devices (BluRay, etc.) into the splitter. Hook the optical from the splitter into the Playbar.
- Turn on the Speech Enhancement on the Sonos App and Night Mode.
- You’re done! You now have clean audio and a functioning Dolby 5.1 signal that has clear dialog.
I’d like to point out here that the true villain of this story is Samsung for essentially lying about the pass-through capability of the TV. Sonos should bear some blame here too – it could easily better educate customers and include some common troubleshooting advice either online or in the documentation.
Hope this helps!
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