I’m exploring changes in our home music system. For decades, we’ve used a NAD receiver ( a C740 from around 1998) with two passive Polk speakers, a CD player and a turntable, all in the living room. The NAD has no phono pre-amp so I’ve wired one in and we play our vinyl successfully.
We’ve recently added a pair of ERA 100’s in a separate room, and finally joined the streaming generation via Tidal. Love it. In a third room, we’ve added a Beam 2 and a mini-sub to our TV set-up. Love those, too. Sometimes I add that room in when listening to music via Tidal. But right now, the old-school stereo isn’t connected to the Sonos gear. As a separate matter, we’d like to swap out the stereo’s pair of Polk SDA Compact bookshelf speakers (which ain’t so compact) for a pair of smaller speakers. The Sonos 5’s come to mind as a means by which the old NAD can connect with the new. Ideally that connection could work both ways.
The NAD has left and right channel pre-amp OUT ports in case a user wants to use a different power amp, I guess. But by default, there are jumpers connecting those OUTS to INS so that the receiver’s own amp can do the work.
I’d remove the jumpers, then connect the pre-amp OUT’s to a Sonos Five, using an RCA to 3.5mm plug-equipped cable. Am I correct that any source I have connected to the NAD----FM, CD, turntable, tape---can then be played to the Fives? And, if wanted (maybe I wouldn’t), any tone corrections made on the NAD would be effective? I think Sonos claims that the Five would automatically sense a signal at its line-in port and switch to it. Then, when wanting instead to use the Fives with Tidal streaming, we could do that, wirelessly adding in the Sonos- equipped other rooms if we chose.
By replacing the Polks with Sonos Fives, we could avoid something like the Port, which I’ve read may end up processing music data which will be processed again through Sonos speakers anyway.
Is this a workable plan? What are the problems, if any?
