Sonos with turntable - analog solutions for needle-to-speaker delay?

Forum|Forum|11 years ago
September 9, 2015
3 replies
1861 views

Here's questions if you connect a turntable to Sonos, and like to listen to records in the room where you keep the turntable.

How do you deal with the slap-back delay between the needle surface noise and the music from the speakers?

Has anyone tried having a separate analog connection to that room's speakers with an option to switch back and forth?

My connection in the home office goes Turntable > Marantz Amp "pre out" jack > Sonos Connect:Amp > wired ceiling speakers.

I think I can solve this problem if I also connect both amps to a speaker switch box, then out to the wires to the ceiling speakers. Basically choosing if I want the speakers in sync with the needle or the rest of the house. This would also help with the cable box audio into that same Marantz amp to have it be more in sync with the mouths on the TV.

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to do this? This item from Monoprice is the closest off-the-shelf item I've found that can do this. Most boxes like this let you choose only between multiple outputs, not inputs like this does.

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=109&cp_id=10903&cs_id=1090307&p_id=8231&seq=1&format=2

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T

The LHC

"slap-back delay"? That's a new one, I don't understand what you're saying here, you can here the audio coming off the surface of the record over the audio coming from the speakers? Are you a bat or something?

buzz

Grand Maestro

cowbellguy,

I don't feel very "warm and fuzzy" about that Mono Price unit, but it will solve your signal latency issue -- provided you are not attempting to simultaneously listen to speakers connected to the MARANTZ and the CONNECT:AMP.

With respect to the turntable, I don't think that the arm/cartridge combination should produce so much chatter. Yes, there will always be a certain amount of chatter, but an incorrect arm cartridge match combined with a loose arm bearing, will result in excess chatter. Note that this chatter is symmetric. By this I mean that the arm will be easily excited by the speaker output, resulting in acoustic feedback and rather colored sound.

E

elarrr

Lyricist I

I know your question is a couple years old, but I wanted to chime in on this. I find surprisingly little discussion of this problem, but I agree! I used to have a turntable hooked up to a Play:5 and I also noticed a delay between "needle chatter" and speaker output. It bugged me. I grew up listening to vinyl and hearing the subtle rhythmic hiss of the needle in the background was always part of the experience. Maybe I had a crappy needle. I don't know, but it's always been there in my experience. It's not necessarily something that you want, but the thing is, most of the time you wouldn't notice it's there. However, when it is out of sync with the speaker, boy do I ever notice it. It creates a weird dissonance and makes the whole vinyl experience feel like a simulation and not the real thing.

I no longer have the Play:5 (lost it in a fire) and I'm getting ready to set my system back up again. This time, I'm going with a traditional analog setup. The turntable will go into a receiver and wired speakers. However, I do still enjoy listening to streaming music over my Sonos system, so I'm probably going to get the Connect so I have the option of sending vinyl audio (and a CD player and over-the-air tuner) to other rooms - in the event that I want that. Unfortunately, the out-of-sync hiss from the needle will still be there and I don't think there's any way for sonos to get rid of it, because they have to buffer the output of the sound to account for the slower speed of WiFi vs the speed of a speaker wire. SO... this problem won't go away, I imagine, until the speed of WiFi begins to approach the speed of light. The alternative is you house your turntable in such a way that the noise is muffled — or perhaps a turntable with a better cartridge would produce less noise.

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