Hardwire 2x Play 5 to Turntable

  • 29 October 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 1920 views

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Hi,

I am thinking of purchasing 2x play 5s (to act as a stereo pair) with the sonos subwoofer and hardwire them to my Turntable. I know the typical way to connect this to the TT is line in on one play 5 and then connect (digitally) to the 2nd play 5 but I was looking to stay strictly analog as I want both play 5 speakers to play uncompressed audio. Is it possible to hardwire a pair of play 5s and the subwoofer to a TT? What would need to be added to this set-up to make this happen?

Sidenote - if this is possible, once hardwired, would I be able to stream the uncompressed audio coming out of my 2x play 5s w/ sub throughout my household with my other sonos speakers?

Really would appreciate the advice, thanks so much!

Thanks,
Andrew

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4 replies

Userlevel 5
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As long as your turntable has a pre-amp you should be able to use an RCA-Y cable to connect the turntable directly to the Play:5's

This article should help. Using Line-In.
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Yes, I believe my TT has a pre-amp. I use the Audio Technica 60 and plan to move up to Audio Technica 120. So how would the RCA-Y cable work? Apologies, I'm still confused how the single output of the RCA-Y would connect to both play 5s. Would i buy 2 of them and have 1 connected to white and one connected to red? And then connect them both to the each play 5 separately?
Userlevel 7
Badge +22
I'm not sure how well that is going to work out but it will be interesting to hear how it goes.

I'm thinking (but not sure) that:

You'd have to run the Play 5s as different rooms and not grouped in order to have both accept sound from their line-in jacks instead of having them paired which would be the normal situation.

You would have to have an adapter cable to send the right pre-amp signal to both the right and left inputs on the right speaker and the reverse for the left one.

I don't know if the sound path is from the analog jack to the internal amplifiers of if it is converted to digital first. I'd guess the second but I'm not certain.

Some of the more expert folks should have answers they are sure of so I'd wait for them to comment.
It is not going to work. You would have to pair them and then bond the Sub as all one room. But each Play:5 line in is a single source, and you cannot choose two sources playing together in one room. Also, the line in is always digitized, so you cannot get around that.

However, there is good news. When set to uncompressed, the line in digitization is lossless, so there is no difference from the analog input. Don't believe the myth that digital conversion always deteriorates the signal, it simply is not true. Nyquist-Shannon proves that fact.