Sonos Era300 video

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austinsignal

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Austin, Texas
No idea if anyone is interested in this, but it's fascinating to me and in truth I've become a bit of a fanboy of the Sonos / Atmos implementation. I sold my house and studio, and moved into a smaller home. I'm building a new vinyl mastering / Atmos mix room right now, but in the house I decided to put up a living room and den, both with Sonos Atmos gear. I'm doing it for personal enjoyment, and as places to check mixes on consumer rigs. Large living room has a Sonos ARC and a sub-mini (haven't convinced my wife to put Era 300's in the living room as of yet), the Den has an Arc, sub-mini, and a pair of Era 300's. In addition to checking mixes, I think I'm going to put together some test audio files of individual sounds to see how the Sonos gear plays program material panned up high, to the sides, etc. in both rooms. Neither room is really treated in any way; I'm just using the Sonos stuff in a way that a normal consumer would - just using the speakers and the Sonos room-tuning software. I have to say that so far, just listening to Apple Music/Atmos stuff (my mixes and others), it's very enjoyable on both systems. An interesting note - stereo material played in the den puts out audio into the Arc and the Era 300's....a kind of simulated surround. So, it's also a bit difficult to know what Atmos encoding is doing, vs. simulated surround. Hence my plan on creating test audio and comparing.

Anyway, when thinking about all this I searched the worldwideweb for information about placing Era 300's in a listening environment. They're wild speakers and this video does a nice job of explaining what's happening when they play audio. I know most of the people hanging out here have systems way past what Sonos offers, but I'm hoping that this kind of gear will hopefully create more uptake for ATMOS in the consumer market. Sonos Era300 Explanation
 
While my main listening room is a full 7.2.4 array with Atmos AVR etc., my family room system is a Sonos setup with Arc soundbar, a Sub (Gen 3), and a pair of in-wall speakers in the rear, driven by a Sonos Amp. My mandate for this room was a system as unobtrusive as possible with no visible wires and no ceiling speakers. Since the Arc soundbar has an array of speakers contained within to replicate the front left, center and right as well as upfiring speakers for the Atmos "bounce off the ceiling" effect, combined with the rear speakers, it creates a 5.1.2 Atmos-capable system. Admittedly not nearly as good as my main rig, but capable of a very satisfying surround experience, for both movies and music. I just today learned that my Apple Music subscription is fully compatible of delivering streaming Atmos mixes to my Sonos system natively through the Sonos app, and it actually sounds really good. This is great for casual music listening when I am on the main floor of the house and don't want to go to the trouble of firing up my main rig.
 
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