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Hi all.  I got my first Sonos speakers, am hooked and want to expand. I got a Beam Gen 2 and a pair of Era 100s. I’m looking to add more for my large house, and my engineering brain craves more knowledge on how this system works.

My questions boils down to this: I’ve read that when adding a sub to your setup, Sonos will automatically apply a low-pass filter to the sub and high-pass to the other speakers, thus unburdening them from having to handle low frequencies.  Thats cool.  My question is, does Sonos only do that when adding a sub to a group, or do they also do that for other speaker combinations. For example, if I add a new five to my existing Era100s pair, would Sonos apply some filter to optimize for that combination to account for what I imagine is better bass capability of the five vs. the Era100s?  

The answer may help me think about how I grow my system either incrementally or with bigger upgrades. If adding a single five to my Era100’s pair wouldnt be ideal, I’d just wait to get a stereo pair of fives for my big kitchen and move the Era100’s elsewhere.

Thanks!

You cannot “add” a Five to a pair of Era 100’s and have them be in the same Room.  Rooms in Sonos can only be the following:

 

Single speaker (with or without sub)

Stereo pair of two like models (with or without sub)

Soundbar/Amp in Home Theater (with or without two like surrounds and/or sub(s))

 

All of these configurations will set a different crossover when a sub is being used as opposed to no sub.

As to other configurations, you are speaking about grouping.  Grouping is a temporary, on-the-fly, grouping of two rooms that will play the same source in perfect sync.  Each “room” in a group will play the whole source as stereo (Atmos audio is downgraded to stereo in a group).

Oh shoot, I guess my understanding of how a ‘room’ works was just wrong.  Thanks.

Oh shoot, I guess my understanding of how a ‘room’ works was just wrong.  Thanks.

 

It make sense if you think about it. The system has to have  discrete channels of audio (or spatial locations of audio in the case of atmos),  strategically bouncing audio of walls and ceilings, high pass filters, keep audio in sync accross multiple devices, volume control, trueplay tuning, and probably other factors I’m not thinking of.  That’s a difficult task with a known set of possible room configurations, and exponentially more difficult when you allow users to setup any possible configuration.

 

It make sense if you think about it. The system has to have  discrete channels of audio (or spatial locations of audio in the case of atmos),  strategically bouncing audio of walls and ceilings, high pass filters, keep audio in sync accross multiple devices, volume control, trueplay tuning, and probably other factors I’m not thinking of.  That’s a difficult task with a known set of possible room configurations, and exponentially more difficult when you allow users to setup any possible configuration.

 

Plus, they want it to sound good, because hearing Sonos at another home is one of the best ways to sell it.  So they only allow optimum sounding configurations, regardless of what is wanted by some.  As we saw in the various “I’m using grouped Era 300’s as fronts for my Arc and it sounds awesome” threads, what “sounds awesome” doesn’t really sound awesome at all, and Sonos isn’t going to bend over backwards to allow you to configure the system that way.

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