Line-In Latency/Delay Disable PLAY:5

Just had a marketing email from Sonos suggesting that I use a Sonos speaker in my home office as a “ home office assistant”. I’m confused - why would you introduce a Sonos [rather than, say, an Echo Dot] into a home office where the chances are you already have a computer with speakers … unless of course you could replace the computer speakers with the Sonos … but for many, the latency issue may be a barrier to doing so … ? 

Add me to those hoping for a low-latency line-in option!

My Setup:

• PLAY:5 connected to computer (line-in)
• Playing Piano on the computer via Keyboard (MIDI-Connection)
• The delay of 75ms sucks hard when learning to play piano with a software

Please Sonos, this is a legit use-case!

+1 for the direct line-in with 0 delay for isolated use. 

The 75ms delay when using line in has just stopped me from buying a pair of Play5’s. Absolutely gutted :(

We purchased a Sonos Beam and Sub (which we love) towards the end of last year with intention of adding the Play5’s for a bit more versatility around the house, including mixing records from my DJ setup when the mood strikes. 
 

Ive been fiddling with hi-fi and audio products for a good part of 25 years and this is the first time I’ve come across a product with a direct line in which suffers from this type of lag (even the salesman who sold me our other SONOS products was surprised to hear this was true) Although highly disappointed, I am glad I discovered this before dropping another £1k on these speakers. In fact, it’s kind of hard to justify the rest of my SONOS setup now and will probably be spending the rest of weekend researching alternatives; THIS SUCKS! 😭

Oh man I’m exactly in the same situation. Beam and Sub for home theater, and now wanted to extend for the real musical experience and connection my DJ setup with two Play5. What did you come up with by searching for an alternative?

Btw even tried the monitor setup, but the delay is too much for a normal living room, this gives a huge sound mess.

I was very impressed with the sound of Play 5 and Sub when I auditioned them last year.

In December I bought Play 5, Sub and One and just used them for playing music on my phone or laptop. 

I am a Dj but have not really had the opportunity to dj at home using the Sonos speaker until this weekend.

As a DJ, I discovered the latency issues which has really disappointed me, due to its impact on mixing songs.  If I had known the issue present, it would have been a deal breaker.

I truly hope Sonos can address this issue, even if a 0ms latency could be had for Line-in use only,  which will open up these fantastic speakers to a potentially larger market.  

The input delay was rather peculiar to me when I first learnt about it, while of course I understand the reason for its existence.  Sonos is the only product I am aware of that has this delay for a locally connected device, as pretty much every other device on earth has a line-in connected directly to the preamps. In the Sonos case of course the line-in is fed to the audio processing circuitry, so they can generalize the case and allow cross-device connections without altering the latency. If you are listening locally, the signal is simply looped back to the local device. So it's both a smart and a dumb move. I'm sensing that they had a really strong architecture guy holding his hands over this, and nobody was allowed to mess with his beautiful simple design. :-) 

It does makes Sonos a bit of a show stopper when it comes to use for certain AV applications, live instruments, karaoke or some computer applications.  Nobody in their right minds would buy Sonos for Audio/Video applications unless they have the ability to delay the video stream the required 70ms. If you can do that (which most high end TVs can do), then there is absolutely no problem whatsoever. If you can't delay the video, then just don't buy Sonos for this application. 

But congrats to the Sonos team for putting together a solid architecture that has really stood the test of time. If I feel daring I might take one of my out-of-warranty devices and examine the signal path.  I suspect it has an all digital connection to the class D amp, which makes it non-feasible to wire a line-in to the audio amplifier directly. I do have an application where direct connection would be beneficial, and I see no reason to introduce new competitors into the food chain.
 

I would love to hear from Sonos on this.

Do they reply to these feeds?

I LOVE my sonos, but +1 on this being an issue I’d not anticipated and is stopping me buying further into the ecosystem.

Hi @sjh.

Welcome, thank you for reaching out to Sonos Community.

You can try to check this link for Use Line-In on Sonos

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