Architectural is a line of speakers from Sonance, not an adjective. I’ve not checked recently, but I don’t recall anything in the Architectural line for outdoor use, but if such exists, yes, this would work. However, all three pairs of speakers would be playing the same content at the same time. And you wouldn’t be able to vary the volume on each pair. The Sonos Amp has a single stereo output. You can’t separate the output in to three disparate streams. 

SONOS Architectural speakers.

Good to know, it’s been a long time since I looked. 

Keep in mind also only the ones sold by Sonos are designed to have six connected.

I’d have copied that bit but apparently the Sonos Web folk have disabled copying from that page.

I’d be curious to see how TruePlay performed if you used 4 supported speakers inside and tuned them, ignoring the outside ones.

Glad you’ve expanded your knowledge of a rather small product line.

So I guess what I’m really asking is this - What’s the special sauce in the architectural line that enables you to drive 3 pairs from one amp.

I understand the new amps will drive down to 4ohm at 250w. Parallel wiring 2 speakers of 8ohm impedance gives you 4ohm, so I understand the limitation of third party 8ohm speakers.

What I don’t understand is how it’s able to drive 3 pairs of 8ohm parallel wired Sonos by Sonance speakers? This would be making the amp work down to 2.67ohm. Probably POP sometime soon for that amp!?

My concern was that whatever they’re doing to allow this to happen was different between the in-ceiling and the outdoors, and that I’d be forcing the amp into an early grave.

Any thoughts? (I am very technical, don’t hold back)

To the above poster - I know that trueplay isn’t supported on the outdoor speakers, so I expect to lose it entirely when bringing a single pair of the outdoors into the mix. This is fine.

EDIT: Not an answer, accidently clicked that button. If an admin could change it that’d be great?

Moderator: Done

Speaker specs quoted to the pubic are very slippery. As you know, the magnitude of the impedance varies with frequency. Some speaker specs will quote the low point, others will pick a frequency, near 50Hz, even if there is a much lower value in the 20Hz range. I guess that the person writing the spec assumes that there is very little music down there or that amplifiers roll off below 50Hz. Some amplifiers, such as the earlier SONOS amplifiers are very literal with respect to taking obvious protective action if there is any dip below 4-Ohms. Other amplifiers, such as the SONOS ARC will allow some brief transgressions below 4-Ohms without raising a fuss.

I assume that SONOS and SONANCE, since they have detailed (unpublished) knowledge about both products, have made a judgement call that three pairs of the Architectural speakers can be safely driven by the SONOS AMP. There are a bunch of high end speakers that have unfortunate impedance dips that fluster most amplifiers designed for minimum 4-Ohm loads. ARC will deal with many of these without raising a fuss. All of the SONOS amplifiers are well protected against current and thermal transgressions.

Sonos has never mentioned what is special about the Sonos version of Sonance speakers, only that the indoor ones support TruePlay and you can use three of them per channel.