Sonos - Arc and Amp - Easy Way to Optionally Choose to Play through Both or Just Arc

Not for TV audio though.  You can create Alexa groups, and probably something similar in GA, to play streaming music to a group of Sonos rooms, but not TV audio.  Sonos Voice can do this though .

I’m thinking the delay is going to be a deal breaker, since the kitchen is adjacent.

Thank you, UKMedia and melvimbe for your suggestions.

For this to work, we would like it to be very simple to use for his whole family. The idea was that when making dinner, for example, they could also be in the adjacent kitchen listening to the TV sound playing over the ceiling speakers (while some of the family watches and listens to the TV/Sound bar in the Living Room). It would be important that to have all the sound in sync -- after all, that is one of the features that draws us to Sonos in the first place.

I looked up a bit about Sonos Voice (having never used it myself).  Could I ask (wrt your notes above): 

1. Why would playing TV audio through the Sonos sounder and Sonos amp together yield a delay in one or the other? I thought that the technology was such that they would be in Sync.
2. Why would Ungroup on Autoplay being turned off impact things wrt sound being in sync?
3. With Sonos Voice would one just say to the Sonos Sound bar, for example, “Hey Sonos, group the living room and kitchen” or “Hey Sonos, play everywhere”, to listen to the TV audio on the Sonos sound bar and the Sonos Amp/kitchen ceiling speakers? And when done, just turn off the TV (would this automatically cancel the grouping?) or simply say to the Sound bar, “Hey Sonos, Ungroup”?
4. With the Sonos skill on Alexa, can you do the grouping and ungrouping similarly via Alexa? (That way they could cancel the grouping without leaving the kitchen, just by speaking to their Echo.)

Thanks again for your support on this.

I read the requirement as the user wanted to use voice control to group (turn on) TV audio in both the main room and the kitchen.  You can do that with SVC, “Hey Sonos, group Main Room and Kitchen”, but no such command exists for Alexa.

With Alexa you can setup a group containing both Main Room and Kitchen (call it Happy Hour), and then make command like “Alexa, play def leppard on Happy Hour”.  Alexa does not handle TV audio, only streaming, so it can’t a command for that.  Likewise, there is no command to just group to rooms together without changing what’s playing.  And Alexa does not have that concept.

Another way to look at it is that Amazon built Alexa to control echo devices, and does not contain commands that echos can’t handle.  SVC is built for what Sonos speakers can do.

You get delays of TV sound through multi-Room Groups.

You do not get delays of TV sound from your 5.1 Room’s speakers.

Thank you all for your support. I will have to keep on looking. Sonos, if you are listening, it would be a good idea and much appreciated by loyal users to have all grouped speakers in sync even if listening to TV audio. (And, as an aside, it will be great when somebody implements an automatic in-sync TV voice-picture system using AI or something.)

Sending ‘demanding’ PCM stereo (uncompressed) TV audio across a wired/wireless LAN to play on ‘grouped’ rooms is always going to need a certain sized buffer - Sonos uses ~75ms by default which works for most (not all) users & their home networks… To keep things in A/V sync, you need the ability to buffer/delay the video on screen to be aligned with the grouped playing speakers - there are some TV’s/devices already that can help achieve these things. Apple-TV and some LG & Sony TV’s have lip-sync features, but really it needs the A/V industry to come up with a firm solution.

That said ‘bonded’ Sonos players over a 5Ghz ad-hoc network seems to be able to achieve lip-sync with two surrounds and up-to two Subs for the majority of users, but more than that amount of players may perhaps prove difficult.

Anyhow, lip-sync is really only necessary if all the ‘grouped’ Sonos players are in the same physical room - if they are placed elsewhere in the Home, then the delay often does not become an issue… and for me a current Sonos HT setup with surrounds and Subs is plenty for most folks viewing locations in a majority of Homes in any event. So I’m not sure the A/V industry would want to invest in having more than say a 7.2.setup in a room.

If this does ever happen, I suspect it may be years, rather than months, before we see it.

As I said, it can’t be done.  Part of the sync process is that a buffer is built up, so that any missed/corrupted packets can be requested again, or any intermittent wireless interference can be overcome by the time the buffer runs out.  Using the low latency direct 5 GHz connection for surrounds and Sub, that buffer can be small, small enough to not affect lip-sync with the video.  That small buffer can’t be used for grouping, because dropouts would occur due to the harsher conditions of going room to room and floor to floor, so the buffer has to be larger, and the signal has to be 2.4 GHz instead of 5 GHz.

So until the industry standardizes on a method to delay the video 75 ms in order to get all units to sync up, there’s nothing Sonos can do.  Physics wins every time.

Thanks again all. It is also an annoyance in Canada too. And taking advantage of the video delay relative to the audio (due to TV video processing), I am pretty hopeful that Sonos Engineering can look into this sync issue in the Sonos groups to avoid the resultant echoing that so many users describe in their groups when playing TV audio. That may take a bigger effort - but hopefully just some fancy firmware/software updates on our end and maybe a new Sonos “box” we buy that takes the video and audio signals together, holds them up appropriately and gets the audio aligning across the speaker groups and feeds the video at just the right time to the TV to keep lip sync right. With feedback and audio alignment self correcting ongoing and auto-adjusting for poor sound/video alignment program by program. (Hopefully without having to have yet another box with a camera and microphone that “watches” and “listens” and sends feedback to the first box.) We’re counting on you Sonos Engineering.

On the contrary, with Physics and Engineering, I believe that this is all very do-able. The first part - defining the problem - is already done. The need is identified. The challenge is on!

It’s clearly an issue of Sonos not being motivated enough to rewrite the entire underlying network design of their software. Anything can be done in software!

From Sonos website blog:

“Although Sonos is perceived as a maker of audio hardware, at its core lies a million-line codebase, with vast cloud operations, highly-optimised embedded code developed by a team of hundreds of brilliant software engineers, and a track record of innovation spanning 20 years and 500 patented inventions.

Our team, Sonos Advanced Technology, is focused on future-facing innovation and R&D within Sonos. We are an interdisciplinary group with backgrounds spanning physics, computer science, acoustics, studio production, sonic arts, and machine learning, working together to explore open problems with a 5-year horizon. It's an amusing paradox that, given the team’s background in solving some of the world's hardest problems - from astrophysics to animal auditory processing to AI-driven drug discovery - our unifying goal is to create experiences that are as simple and as effortless to use as possible.”

They can do this.

Dark matter cables routed through a black hole to get the time dilation effects?