Sonos Connect Wireless support for front surround speakers with Sonos Sound bar

No, it isn't.

Well, kinda sorta. Provided you have some sort of reciever/amp to use with the connect. You could group the connect with the play bar to get the audio to those wired speakers. They would be a stereo pair and not true surround but they would output whatever the play bar is playing.

Well, kinda sorta. Provided you have some sort of reciever/amp to use with the connect. You could group the connect with the play bar to get the audio to those wired speakers. They would be a stereo pair and not true surround but they would output whatever the play bar is playing.

TV sound is delayed when played via a grouped room because grouped rooms are using 2.4 GHZ instead of low-latency 5 GHz used by the Playbar/Sub/Surrounds combination. This is OK when streaming TV audio to another room, but would cause a quite noticeable echo if the Connect/Playbar are in the same room. This isn't even counting any possible additional delays caused by a DSP being used in the receiver.

Well, kinda sorta. Provided you have some sort of reciever/amp to use with the connect. You could group the connect with the play bar to get the audio to those wired speakers. They would be a stereo pair and not true surround but they would output whatever the play bar is playing.

TV sound is delayed when played via a grouped room because grouped rooms are using 2.4 GHZ instead of low-latency 5 GHz used by the Playbar/Sub/Surrounds combination. This is OK when streaming TV audio to another room, but would cause a quite noticeable echo if the Connect/Playbar are in the same room. This isn't even counting any possible additional delays caused by a DSP being used in the receiver.

Absolutely. Likely it would be horrendous! If not make you physically ill as it would make me!

TV sound is delayed when played via a grouped room because grouped rooms are using 2.4 GHZ instead of low-latency 5 GHz used by the Playbar/Sub/Surrounds combination. This is OK when streaming TV audio to another room, but would cause a quite noticeable echo if the Connect/Playbar are in the same room. This isn't even counting any possible additional delays caused by a DSP being used in the receiver.[/quote]

So let me get this. As long as I'm playing music there is no delay from room to room? But if I'm listening to tv on grouped speakers there is a delay? I never noticed a delay but speakers are in living room & kitchen.

Right. You're not able to "see/feel" the delay when you're playing music only, since it has already been buffered for that delay, so all speakers play in sync. However, the Playbar, which is normally on the 5Ghz frequency for the surrounds when playing Dolby Digital from the optical input, has to shift to 2.4 Ghz to communicate with the rest of the speakers, which then incurs that delay between the 5.1 system and the other speakers. But if the Playbar is playing streaming music, it's already buffered. It's only the input from the TV that you can perceive that extra buffering.

And yes, I don't perceive it very well when walking from my TV room to my kitchen, either.

Right. You're not able to "see/feel" the delay when you're playing music only, since it has already been buffered for that delay, so all speakers play in sync. However, the Playbar, which is normally on the 5Ghz frequency for the surrounds when playing Dolby Digital from the optical input, has to shift to 2.4 Ghz to communicate with the rest of the speakers, which then incurs that delay between the 5.1 system and the other speakers. But if the Playbar is playing streaming music, it's already buffered. It's only the input from the TV that you can perceive that extra buffering.

And yes, I don't perceive it very well when walking from my TV room to my kitchen, either.

Does this same delay occur if you only have Playbase and Sub with no surround speakers?

Also, does operating in boost mode have any impact?

There will always be a delay for TV audio for any other rooms that are grouped with a Playbar. It is unavoidable. This is because the TV audio must be buffered to stream over the higher latency of the 2.4 GHz network used between Grouped rooms.

What jgatie said. All the speakers in the Playbar/Playbase system are linked using 5GHz. This is why the original Play:5s aren't good for surround speakers, or why the Connect:Amp has to be hard wired to work as surround speaker. They don't have a 5Ghz receiver in them, since they were designed before Sonos got into the Playbar market.

5Ghz is fast, but gets absorbed fairly easily, so it's used by Sonos for speakers that will be in the same room. When you get to anything that might be further away, they move over to the 2.4Ghz band, which has better distance, but as jgatie says, there's a higher latency issue which shows up as that ~70ms delay.