Sonos Connect with Home Theater

That is a function of your receiver, not Sonos.

Dolby Pro Logic, which all modern receivers have (since the 1990's) will enable the use of all 5 speakers. I don't use mine this way, ever, when seriously listening, but it's good for BGM.

That is a function of your receiver, not Sonos. Thx for the response. Not sure I understand this. For home theater my receiver, which will likely be a Yamaha RX-v683 will obviously have all the speakers hooked up to it. The Sonos Connect will also be hooked up to it. Are you saying that I could setup the Yamaha to only send the Sonos output to certain speakers?

Not to speak for jgatie, but yes, I believe that's what he's saying. Sonos can't tell your receiver what to do with the signal that it sends to the receiver. You would need your receiver to have a configuration to only play stereo when sonos is the input. Really, it's not any different if you connect a CD player, phono, or even your phone or tablet directly to the receiver.

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal. I suppose I haven't paid that much attention to it, but the center channel mostly plays vocals and won't be that overpowering, particularly if you set it as such. It doesn't really sound odd to me at all. And I honestly can't think of a reason why you would want to exclude the sub for music.

Thx for the response. Not sure I understand this. For home theater my receiver, which will likely be a Yamaha RX-v683 will obviously have all the speakers hooked up to it. The Sonos Connect will also be hooked up to it. Are you saying that I could setup the Yamaha to only send the Sonos output to certain speakers?

The Connect will only output stereo. What the receiver does with that stereo signal is up to whatever DSP functions the receiver has to manipulate that stereo signal. Most receivers have a multi-channel stereo DSP setting that sends the signal to all speakers, a 'pure' or 'through" setting that plays the stereo through only the two fronts, a Pro-logic setting that simulates surround sound from a stereo signal, etc. These are all a function of the receiver, not Sonos.

Yamaha amps (and most decent AV receivers) have the facility to select a default audio processing mode per input. This means whatever physical input you use, be it analogue stereo, optical or coax, you can have the amp default to Straight (front L&R only, no sub), Stereo (L&R + sub), 7ch stereo (all surround speakers + sub) or some version of surround including ProLogic II Cinema/Music/Game or the DTS equivalents etc etc by making an appropriate selection in the amp's set-up menus.

What you can do with a Connect is hook it in to the receiver with multiple connections. That way you could have different default decoding modes. eg. analogue stereo could default to 7ch stereo, coax to Stereo + sub, Optical to DTS Neo Music.

However, the above is the only way you can change which speakers are used.

What is not available is a way to change the speaker set-up per source with the Yamaha. If your speaker layout is 5.1 then anything other than Pure or Stereo will use all 5 surrounds. It can't be 4.1 or L,C,R only fir example.

My front speakers are large full-range Hi-Fi speakers. I run in pure mode for 2ch CD/SACD and vinyl. Most of my radio and background music listening is done in 7ch stereo. That works for me :)

I have been using Yamaha amps fit the last 6-7 years; a couple of RX-V7 series receivers and now an RX-A10 series amp.

Thank you all for the responses - I really appreciate it. Sounds like what I'm trying to do can work - I just need to have the receiver input i have the sonos connected to set properly (i'm thinking just l,r, sub) and it will bypass the others. As melvimbe says maybe i am overthinking this and the center wouldn't bother me but I've heard others say it can be an issue. Thanks again.