adding non sonos speakers to current system

Hi @Ubet, 

The Amp should be able to power those speakers. I can’t find a lot of information for them online, so I can’t say if they will for sure work, but I would just recommend you make sure those speakers are 4-8 Ohms.

I hope this information helps.

They’re the aw650 not 350, my mistake. 
95db, 85watts/340peak. Will sonos amp be ok for them?

Or is their a better outdoor speaker I should be looking at? 

So what speakers would you guys recommend then? I want something loud with a lot of sound but clear. 

Look for high efficiency speakers with the 125 Watt continuous power rating for absolute safety. Of course if driven to that continuous power level they will likely sound quite horrible due to clipping.

I’d not hesitate to use the ones here, with the volume limit as suggested to prevent someone who is not actually listening to the speakers from blowing them out. Anyone actually listening to them would recognize the sound of them being over-driven and dial the volume back. The speakers peak rating is more than adequate to deal with short term sound peaks.

“Clipping” is an amplifier phenomenon occurring when an attempt is made to drive the amplifier beyond its design limits. Speakers don’t clip. Clipping is a form of distortion that is rich in extra high frequency energy that can blow out tweeters. If a user is habitually blowing out tweeters a more powerful amplifier will help, but user education is also necessary. If the sound seems distorted, back off. Unfortunately, for too many users “distorted” equates with “loud” and this leads to damaged speakers.

SONOS amplifiers will are excellent designs that will not enter this clipping mode. Any attempt by the user to do this will result in the amplifier reducing Volume or shutting down. In this respect the SONOS amplifiers will tend to protect speakers from user abuse. However, if the user is persistent, it is usually possible to damage a speaker -- regardless of the amplifier and speaker power ratings.

Speaker power ratings are very slippery. Only the person who assigned the number knows what it means. Cheap, inferior speakers often have higher published power ratings than high quality, more conservatively rated speakers. I assume that this is an attempt by the cheap speaker manufacturer to imply high quality. The AW-650’s are rated at 85W and 340W. I have no idea exactly what this means. Supposedly an occasional peak at 340W is OK, but the spec fails to give a time duration for this peak.

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I’m not sure what you mean by “a lot of sound”. Realize that the “room” outside is rather large and anything smaller than the rock concert speakers that you’ve seen used outdoors, might be a disappointment. That said, the AW-650’s are more efficient than many speakers and, depending on your expectations, can do a decent job outside. Adding additional speakers will enhance coverage. If you want “thumping” sound, you’ll need to add a subwoofer.

I would not hesitate to use these speakers with AMP. If the speakers seem to be struggling, back off. (And my comment would be the same if you were using a 60W amplifier.)

I’ve never had a Sonos Amp to play with to hear what the clipping protection it applies sounds like. I would hope it would be something along the line of an audio compressor (as dBx makes) that applies soft limiting to the signal above a set level to avoid the high frequencies generated when a conventional amplifier clips.

When using a dBx compressor to limit maximum volume peaks while letting me play at a higher average volume than my speakers would safely support, music sounded fairly neutral at lower levels of compression but the sound got progressively worse as I raised the (average) volume, pushing more of the signal into the compressors range window. The higher the compression ratio setting the worse the music sounded once it reached the compression threshold.

I had a Carver M-1.5t (yes I am old) 350 continuous Watts, peak up to 1200 Watts, while my LaScalla speakers were limited to 400 continuous Watts and I did not want to find out what new drivers cost.

Has anyone tried driving the Sonos Amp into the clipping prevention level of power output? How did it sound?

I’s guess Sonos speakers sound a bit different than the Amp and non-Sonos speakers in the same situation due to the multiple channels of amplification.

If I got 4 of the aw650s, would I need to worry about over powering them? 
 

what other speakers would you recommend? 

Connecting speakers in parallel is similar to adding more lamps to a lighting circuit. You can keep adding speakers (lamps) until the current limit is reached. With respect to sound (light) output, there is essentially no change in output for a given lamp (speaker) output until the limit is exceeded. For AMP the limit is two pairs of 8-Ohm speakers.

So I think I am going to do this, Sonos amp, and two pairs of the aw650s. The wife is going to KILL me. My next question is, our house is log, with a steel siding on it. What is the best way to run the wires through the wall? As I am assuming I should not have the amp outside, even though it would be under a roof and generally protected, we live in Montana though, hot summers long cold winters. 

So to go through the wall, should I run all the wires through one hole or should I make multiple and run them as little outside as possible, and keep as much of it inside as possible? I would like to run them through somewhere in conspicuous ,like behind the top of a window sill, so the curtains could hide the wiring. Should I run the wire through a small poly pipe outside to the speakers?