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Limitations and/or Pitfalls with integrating wired speakers and Amp

  • 29 June 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 526 views

I am currently building out a fitness studio. In order to keep our neighbors reasonably happy, I will be using numerous speakers throughout vs. fewer larger speakers so that I can keep the volume of each speaker low and still distribute sound to my clients. I would like to make Sonos the core of my system. However, my land lord has donated 6 JBL Control 65 P/T 8ohm pendant speakers and an amplifier (Crown 1160MA) for my use. Although I would love to keep it simple and use all Sonos ones, both she and her architect are encouraging me to use the pendant speakers to control the direction of sound (and possibly not have speakers mounted on the walls of the adjacent neighbors). If I utilize the 6 pendant speakers I would probably still need 6 or 8 Sonus ones for the exterior walls. Because numerous different trainers would be coming in to use the music system I hope to keep it as simple as possible. My questions:
1) This speaker setup (6 wired 8ohm speakers and 6-8 Sonus 1's) could be accomplished with simply using 2 Connect Amps correct?
1A) In that setup, how would the Sonos app handle the volume control etc of the wired speakers vs. the Sonos speakers? I don't need multi-room, but I don't want to loose control of the ability to tweak volume or any other aspect of the speakers.
1B) Would I be able to configure the wired and Sonos speakers the way I want in regard to mono or stereo for each speaker?
2) If I used the land lord's Amp, I guess I would do away with one Connect Amp?
2A) How much would introducing the 3rd party device (Amp) disrupt my nice clean Sonos system? I have read things about delay and latency issues. Would I then not be able to control the wired speakers that are attached to the 3rd party amp with the Sonos app? Would it make it harder for trainers to learn the in's and out's of the system?

Thanks for any input that you can share!
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Best answer by upstatemike 30 June 2018, 15:12

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1 reply

There is no down side to using a Connect plus the landlord's amp vs. a Connect Amp apart from a little extra effort to wire things up. Concerns about latency or delay are usually caused when you use a Connect with a Home Theater receiver that has some signal processing built in... should not be an issue with a plain audio amp. A connect acts like a preamp so you can control the volume from Sonos but all speakers will be adjusted together. You can't adjust individual speakers or speaker groups with just a single Connect. You will not be able to switch individual speakers to be either mono or stereo with this set up.

A better configuration for your requirements would be a Connect feeding a multi-zone amp that has some of the features you want like the ability to select mono or stereo for each zone and the ability to balance the volume of the different zones while still using Sonos as the master volume control.