When you connect your Sonos speakers to the Sonos app, you can fine-tune them through a feature called Trueplay. It works surprisingly well to create a spatial audio that bounces sound around the room and mimics a true surround sound system.
Trueplay automatically syncs all your compatible Sonos speakers into one system. It’s smart enough to recognize that a complete surround system requires more fine-tuning than a bunch of disparate parts. It’ll even automatically make changes if it detects that you’ve mounted the Arc or Arc Ultra soundbar to a wall via Sonos’ soundbar wall mount.
There are two options when you go to set it up. Let’s start with the obvious one: custom. It asks you to walk around to various areas in the room in which your Sonos surround sound system is located. On-screen directions through the Sonos app will guide you through the process.
Using a series of noises played, recorded, and measured at each location, Trueplay creates a three-dimensional map of your room so that it knows just how to bounce sound around and off the surfaces, creating, in turn, more of a three-dimensional feeling of the listener being surrounded within the audio, rather than having sound fired straight out of the speakers at their face.
With the Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar and Sonos Sub 4 subwoofer, though, I had better luck with the simplified version of Trueplay titled Quick. When I re-attempted the setup through the simpler version that doesn’t use customized readings, the Sonos system sounded noticeably fuller.
I’m not the only person to have had better results using the simplified Trueplay setting than the more involved setup that scans the room to create a custom setup.
So if you, too, have been scratching your head over your Sonos results, with Quick sounding better than Custom, you’re not going crazy.
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