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

Sonos is late on its support forum Known A solution to the pop sound issue has been found, and this fix was made available to all customers on Thursday. The company claims that a “rare glitch” is the cause of the problem. This may cause the Dolby MAT decoder to play audibly corrupted audio clips, which sound like pop sounds, when normally they are filtered out by the device. Sonos states that it has now improved the decoder so that this corrupted audio data is better filtered out.

The post to which Sonos is responding is nearly three years old and has more than 1,000 comments, full of users claiming to be experiencing the same issue. Also Tom Warren from The Edge Reported last August He suddenly hears the same loud noises when he uses Dolby Atmos with his Arc speaker. At the time, Sonos announced that it had not yet been able to reliably reproduce the issues, and thus had not yet been able to issue a fix.

Sonos’ $900 Dolby Atmos speaker has a loud audio issue with the Xbox Series This is what it sounds like. More information here: https://t.co/g5P4S08dCE pic.twitter.com/1kLLJzSTt9

—Tom Warren (@tomwarn) August 10, 2023