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I am not very familiar with Sonos and I have a technical question about how speakers can be grouped.

I’m wondering if it is possible to have different components part of multiple groups, and how that would or wouldn’t work with Airplay 2.

Essentially I am designing a system for a room with a TV, and I wanted it to be possible to have the system set up as EITHER a 2.1 or a 5.1 (which includes the 2.1).

So say I have the following components:

  • (1) Arc
  • (2) Five
  • (2) One SL
  • (1) Sub

Is it possible to have:

  • Group 1: (2) Five + (1) Sub
  • Group 2: Group 1 + (1) Arc + (2) One SL

Ideally, I would like to have two groups both in Sonos and available to Airplay as “Stereo” and “TV”.

Not easily. There are two concepts in Sonos,’grouping’ and ‘bonding’. Binding is intended to be a semi-permanent collection of speakers.

During setup, you would ‘bond’ the Sub and surrounds (the Ones, most likely) to the Arc so that they are a ‘room’ in the Sonos software. Any source you then play on the Arc will then play on all those speakers. The PLAY:5s would be set up as a stereo pair in another ‘room’ in the Sonos software. Rooms can be grouped with a touch in the controller, but changing the speakers associated with a ‘room’ requires the speakers to be ‘un-bonded’ and set up again, which requires quite a few steps. It’s possible, just not something you’d want to do on a regular basis.

You can set up the rooms you want. You can group them easily. But any one speaker can not be part of two ‘rooms’ at the same time. 

Got it. This was the answer I needed. Thank you.

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