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Jambon3
Contributor I
December 30, 2022
Answered

Amp setup mode - stereo pair vs tv fronts?

  • December 30, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 461 views

Hi Sonos community! My very first piece of Sonos gear is an Amp used for a 50/50 mix of streamed movies and music with my existing floor speakers. These will be my only speakers for now.

During setup I choose TV Fronts as the mode over Stereo Pair for no real reason other than wanting to confirm HDMI ARC functionality first.

Everything seems to be working for both movies and music but I’m curious what the difference was between those choices. I’m also curious why I can’t seem to find these mode options in the settings to play around with or change if I wanted. I can’t even find any references to these settings in the documentation beyond noting that you have to make the choice during initial setup.

Does anyone have any additional information on these two modes and whether they are relevant to my setup and use case at this point?

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Best answer by jgatie

Hi Sonos community! My very first piece of Sonos gear is an Amp used for a 50/50 mix of streamed movies and music with my existing floor speakers. These will be my only speakers for now.

During setup I choose TV Fronts as the mode over Stereo Pair for no real reason other than wanting to confirm HDMI ARC functionality first.

Everything seems to be working for both movies and music but I’m curious what the difference was between those choices. I’m also curious why I can’t seem to find these mode options in the settings to play around with or change if I wanted. I can’t even find any references to these settings in the documentation beyond noting that you have to make the choice during initial setup.

Does anyone have any additional information on these two modes and whether they are relevant to my setup and use case at this point?

 

There’s no difference.  The question in the setup routine was just to trigger the TV setup.  If you had chosen Stereo Pair, it would have skipped the TV setup.  In the end, nothing is really changed.

3 replies

buzz
buzz
Grand Maestro
December 30, 2022

AMP is a stereo device. Just connect it to your speakers.

“Paring” is used for the standalone speakers, such as FIVE or ONE. You can “Bond” two identical speakers together in the APP and they will become a stereo “Room”.

Jambon3Author
Contributor I
December 30, 2022

Buzz,

To clarify, during Amp initial setup there is a step where you must choose “How Do You Want to Use Sonos Amp?” for the 2 wired speaker connections and your choices are tv fronts,  tv surrounds or stereo pair.

 

Documentation does somewhat cover the case of choosing tv surrounds stating that the line in and sub inputs will be disabled in this mode.

 

The other two modes are  not documented further. Regarding the “stereo pair” language, the setup context is for two wired 3rd party speakers so my assumption was that language was not referring to the process of creating a stereo pair of two wireless Sonos speakers but something else.

Speculation on Reddit where I posted the same question is that choosing tv fronts “enables” HDMI ARC which kind of makes sense but at the same time I’d be surprised if Sonos offered an option that disabled this feature with no toggles in settings to go back and forth if a mistake was made.

The lack of info on this subject is leading me to wonder if the stereo pair choice in setup might just be a UI orphan/dead end in set up and there is actually no difference between tv fronts and stereo pair. I’m not willing to redo setup to find out as everything seems to be working for me. I just remain curious as music is 50% of my use and I want to be certain I’m getting everything out of Amp.

 

 

 

jgatie
jgatieAnswer
December 30, 2022

Hi Sonos community! My very first piece of Sonos gear is an Amp used for a 50/50 mix of streamed movies and music with my existing floor speakers. These will be my only speakers for now.

During setup I choose TV Fronts as the mode over Stereo Pair for no real reason other than wanting to confirm HDMI ARC functionality first.

Everything seems to be working for both movies and music but I’m curious what the difference was between those choices. I’m also curious why I can’t seem to find these mode options in the settings to play around with or change if I wanted. I can’t even find any references to these settings in the documentation beyond noting that you have to make the choice during initial setup.

Does anyone have any additional information on these two modes and whether they are relevant to my setup and use case at this point?

 

There’s no difference.  The question in the setup routine was just to trigger the TV setup.  If you had chosen Stereo Pair, it would have skipped the TV setup.  In the end, nothing is really changed.

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