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We bought a Sonos One and Sonos SL on Black Friday last year, we use these in the living room. Just bought a 50” Samsung TV, thinking of looking at maybe getting a Sonos Beam for the TV. if the price is right on Black Friday  this years.  We will be moving the Sonos Speakers to another room.

Biggest dissapointment with the Sonos One is the mic, we found we had to shout to get things working, in the end we bough a Echo Dot to work with it and after a bit of a struggle got it set up, and all was ok.

I did buy a beam about 18 months back from John Lewis, but really struggled to set it up, gave up in the end and sent it back. Have a bit more confidence in setting a Sonos up now, I  have a couple of questions i need some help on

  1. Can you use an Echo Dot and with Alexa to control the Beam, if so can you turn the mic off on the beam. we use Spotify a lot with Alexa and would like to do this with the Beam. Echo dot works much better placed next to were we sit.
  2. Possibly later on we may buy a sub to go with it, biggest issue is placing it, unfortunetly my wife doesnt want it on display, only place i can see is behind the TV unit, its in a corner and i was wondering if this would be ok, as i think speakers in corners can give to much bass.                                                                                                                                                                        Any help appreciated

​​​​​Yes, you can turn off the microphone on the Beam and use the Echo Dot, or any other Echo device, to play music to the Beam using Alexa. I keep the mic turned off on my Arc and use an Echo Show to play music to the Arc.

Placing the Sub in the corner should be fine. Just make sure one side of the acoustic slot is free from obstruction. If you have an iOS device, be sure to run Trueplay tuning.

As @GuitarSuperstar  said, yes… you can use the echo dot if you prefer.

 

as far as Sub placement, should be fine…. I have mine hidden inside a corner TV cabinet and works great.

 

you can use Trueplay to set it up and that will set the levels as it sees fit. You can also tune the bass level in the app if you feel you need more or less bass.

Thanks for the very helpful replies, just need to see if the Beam shows up on a good deal this Black Friday, possibly a Sub as well,after thinking about our Sonos one and SL speakers we will sell them to help fund the Sub, did think of putting them in Kitchen but seems a bit pointless as there is a TV and radio in there as it is.

Before i commit to buy the Beam, final question as to what the beam sounds like against our One and SL in Stereo. We  only used these for streaming radio and Amazon Music. We would want to do the same with the Beam. Maybe in time to come i would get a NAS and see about ripping my CD collection to MP3.

Thanks

If you’re not using the Beam as it is intended, for connection to a TV, I’d suggest staying with other disparate Sonos speakers. You’ll get much better stereo separation by not using the Beam. 

A pair of Sonos Ones or SLs are going to sound better for music than the Beam.

I’m using a Beam as a audio only speaker in a very small room where the size makes it a good fit (and I had a spare Beam) and while it does a decent job the pair of Play 1s I had in there before actually sounded better.

Adding a Sub isn’t necessary but it does add a good bit to the low end without the boominess you can get from boosting the low frequencies on the Ones.

Many options for a NAS, the only requirement is that it support SMB v1. I use a spare Raspberry Pi (a Zero W is plenty of power) with my music on an external SSD, a thumb drive would work as well. SMB v1 NAS for Sonos

I have flagged the spam. Hope nobody clicks that link.

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