connecting an outdoor tv to an outdoor sonos setup

Hi, good morning djpete3. So I’ll preface again by stating that your mileage may very, but happy to post in the hopes that it helps you and/or others. There seems to be a lot of contradictory information and results on this and other forums. Much of it, good or bad, is predicated on each user’s own environment--specifically they’re networking, A/V gear and cabling. Hopefully you have the gear available to test prior to making any changes or further investments. I was lucky enough to be able to test prior to ordering up the necessary cabling and TV.

I’ll provide a little context: 

We did a major backyard patio renovation last spring; stamped concrete, new hot tub, fire pit, Philips Hue lighting, etc. As part of that we installed Polk Atrium Outdoor Speakers, powered by a Sonos Amp and added the Polk Sub100 outdoor subwoofer powered by a Polk SWA500 amp. The two amps live indoors on our living room A/V rack and connect out through the house underground via electrical conduit that was placed during the forming for the concrete work. Sound is awesome and we have an independent Sonos “patio” zone for hanging outside. 

Fast forward to now and we decided to add a TV on the patio. This is where you need to make a decision on what’s important to you and your space. We settled on the limitation of stereo knowing that surround sound outside for TV viewing wasn’t that important to us and that we’d be pulling the TV inside during the winter months. We could have opted to install a Sonos soundbar which would have provided the possibility of grouping the TV sound output to other zones, but we didn’t want to fuss with the mounting or having to deal with it come winter. We could have also chosen to buy another Sonos Amp and run the necessary HDMI cable through the wall and tied it in that way.

Here’s what I ended up doing:  we ran a stereo RCA pair of wires from the new patio TV by way of 3.5mm male to RCA stereo female adapter from the headphone out jack on the TV and plugged that into a 2-input passive preamp with potentiometer, called a Schiit SYS. We then ran an HDMI cable from the new TV to the Zone2 HDMI output of our Denon receiver in the living room. 

This gives us the ability to switch between the patio TV’s sound output and play it through the Sonos AMP/patio speakers as well as watch/listen to the HDMI Zone2 output of the AVR in from the living room. 

There is no noticeable lipsync, lag or delay for us. My guess is because the signal is analog stereo and as such there is no active DSP being performed. 

I realize this is likely not ideal for some, but it works for us and our use case, so hopefully it will help other’s who are looking to do something similar. We had all of the cable runs installed professionally through the walls and in our crawlspace between source and display, so it’s clean and we can always add another Amp if we want to increase functionality or add multi-channel audio for the TV, but for now, we’re completely stoked. I bought a Sonos Move and received it last Sunday. Was able to group it with the rest of the patio speakers and will be picking up a 2nd to combine for a stereo pair to add to the backyard mix for sporting events and get-together’s, but for now it’s serving as our “center channel” due to the way our patio is laid out and the location of the TV relative to the rest of the speakers.  

Sonos Connect → Denon AVR-X3500H CD Input (RCA) & Optical

Denon AVR-X3500H Zone2 pre-out (RCA) → Schiit Sys Input 1 → Sonos Amp (RCA)

Sonos Amp → Polk Atrium + Polk SWA500 → Polk Sub100

TCL 65R625 3.5mm Headphone Out → Schiit Sys Input 2 → Sonos Amp

Denon AVR-X3500H Zone2 HDMI → TCL 65R625 HDMI 1

Long winded post, but again, hopefully it helps.

Cheers!