Saved Groups.

I assume that you have added the Era 100’s as surround speakers and the mini to your Beam in a home theatre setup.

If ‘yes’, then they are one room as far as Sonos is concerned and so you can’t separate them out without removing this bonding of the devices into one room.  If ‘No, you’ll get lip sync issues when grouping your devices in scenario 3.

And last, if you are looking for a quick way of setting up the three options and then switching between them, that’s not possible.

It’s been asked for by many and has, I believe, been logged as an enhancement request. 

The OP appears to be asking about preset groupings, but ia really asking the age-old question, “Can I easily switch my surround speakers to play stereo music?”.  As @UKMedia says, the answer is “no”, and the reason is that the speakers have to ber configured differently for these two roles.  In a HT setup the speakers are “bonded” into a single room, so grouping doesm’t come into it.

@tnprime - you may get something close to what you are seeking if you set the surround speakers to FULL rather than AMBIENT, and whack up the surround volume relative to the soundbar.

Thanks I was afraid this is the answer. Hence the nod to “feature request.”
I think it’s not proper to have to buy and allocate the Era100s ONLY to home theater mode since that seriously devalues them as speakers. Doing so also disables the line in which is the value-add feature for the speakers too. A simple way to save presets would overcome this even if it took a moment for them to re-configure themselves. 

thanks for your reply. 

Thanks John, exactly what I am looking for. And I did find some talk on the internet last night that described the bonded arrangement. However this also disables the Line-In feature on the Era100s which is really a big drawback to this whole setup. 

My solution has been to just create “theater mode” from scratch, watch movie, then re-setup everything as it was. Seems very clunky and un-intuitive for the amount of money spent here.

My feature request joins the chorus then, allow for arrangement presets so I can change from one to the other. Perhaps that requires “unbonding” the sub, soundbar, and surrounds which might take a moment in an automated fashion, but something Sonos can do if I can do it via one-step-at-a-time via the app. Perhaps I want the sub with the soundbar from time to time, or  the sub with the era’s in stereo without a bunch of clunky tapping. Certainly seems like a missing feature that shouldnt be too difficult to enable. 

It would take significantly more than a moment to reconfigure the surround speakers to act as their own Sonos room like that. You could maybe come up with a preset script of all the things that need to happen, as well as saving multiple trueplay tune settings, but it would definitely take some time.  There is a reason why doing this change takes time to do manually already.

but the previous trueplay settings could be saved, they are just EQ settings for various frequencies, since the speakers havent moved no need in reality to redo these each time when switching back and forth. Except for in current method of having to rebuild each setup every time it wipes those settings out. I understand Trueplay eq might be different for home theater setup in relation to the other speakers. Even then it’s optional so shouldnt impede this request. 
 
Even 90-120 seconds is worth the wait from manually tapping through things. All I think I am asking is for configs to be saved and the ability to load them. Network gear etc has this feature all the time. In that use case, all settings saved in a state to and you can choose from multiple files to restore back to. All that is missing is an easy to use interface to choose between.

Anyhow the feature request would be within a defined room, ie “Living Room,” exists two Era100, one Sub Mini, one Beam Gen2, switch between:

1. Stereo Era100 with Sub Mini and Line-in enabled.
2. Beam Gen2, Sub Mini, Era100s as surrounds in home theater mode. 

If that took as long as 90-120 seconds it would still be a finished solution vs manually rebuilding each time. I think there’s probably numerous other scenarios where this would be useful or applicable. 

My view is that if this were really simple to do, and highly valued by enough customers (and potential customers) then Sonos would probably have done it by now.  Even then, it would have to slug it out with all the other candidates for new and enhanced features.

In the end, it is only making something that is already achievable more convenient.

The main reason why this doesn’t appeal to me is that the cost of an extra pair of Era 100s is less than the cost of a couple of swivel chairs that would allow my wife and I to listen to music coming from the right direction.

understood. I too work for a sw/hw manufacturer and sometimes feature requests simply need to be raised by customers and that’s the only reason they’ve never before been placed upon or pushed up the list.

As for adding two additional speakers to listen to music vs home theater simply doesnt make sense in a  small living room space like ours, even if they were free. I get it that in the current situation software-wise for you that might just solve the issue, even if your half joking. 

“In the end, it is only making something that is already achievable more convenient.”
how is it already achievable? Switching between 1 and 2.  I might have not understood this. 

1. Stereo Era100 with Sub Mini and Line-in enabled.
   or
2. Beam Gen2, Sub Mini, Era100s as surrounds in home theater mode. 

Sonos could easily automate it if they had some half decent application developers. However, we all know the truth there. 

They could also allow front left and right speakers with the soundbar as a centre if they really wanted to, which would automatically play stereo music over say Era100/300 speakers, but just don’t want to. 

Giving customers flexibility and options used to be a core part of the Sonos experience. Those days seem like a distant memory. 

They’re just chasing numbers now, and unless they row back on that approach, and really do sort out the application, they’ll be reduced to just another bluetooth speaker maker. 

I can’t help but feel now would be a good time for Apple or Google to buy them so they can offer some decent software and get access to all the Sonos patents. 

This request was first raised when the Playbar was introduced over a decade ago, and hundreds of times since then.  Suffice to say the reason it hasn’t been fulfilled has nothing to do with never being suggested before, and certainly not due to some recent culture change against flexibility and options.

@Ian_S .  Are you suggesting that Sonos wlll go bust if it doesn’t act on its customers’ feature requests?  Are you privy to all Sonos’ market research?  Have you built a multi-billion dollar music tech company through innovation?  Do you have all the costings for all the feature requests and internal ideas currently competing for scarce develppment resource?

And yet you know better than Sonos what they should be doing?  How do you achieve this feat? 

I’m curious: where did you see their existing code, to know with such certainty just how easily it could be done? 
 

Go into settings and remove surrounds, then pair (ex) surrounds as stereo pair, etc

But I don’t really understand why you think your surround system is unfit for stereo music listening?

Admittedly the line-in is an issue for you.  What do you want to use the line-in for?

One shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations about a company’s ability to achieve a function without some knowledge of the underlying design and what is at work.  I happen to know some of the underlying design, so I can state what is possible and/or probable.  

In a surround/sub configuration, to accommodate lip-syncing with the video, the Sonos radios are reconfigured to a one-way dedicated 5 GHz connection from the soundbar to the surrounds.  This requires a series of handshakes to get right, which is why adding surrounds takes a bit of time.  The reverse happens when the surrounds are removed.  So therefore, a quick toggle is not possible.  They could place a hot button that does the add surrounds/remove surrounds at the touch of the button, but that is not going to speed up the actual process, and doesn’t save much from the system menu commands we have today.

If all these speakers remain in a defined room, than most of what you want can achieved rather easily.  Sonos already has the ability to do ‘full’ stereo with stereo playing in surrounds and front soundbar.  Giving the option to just mute the soundbar only meets your audio requirements. 

That said though, many of users with similar request actually want to temporarily create temporary Sonos room, attach their sub to a different room, or move their surrounds to the other side of the house. Your needs is just a small subset of this group.

And adding the line-in from surrounds would be a no go in this option.  You’d changing the ‘master’ of the room from the soundbar to one of your surrounds.    You would need create a separate room for that.

There are three other factors to consider I think.  While you’re thinking about your own requirements, Sonos is also trying to run a business that relies on product sales. Enabling users to more easily rearrange speakers in different configurations, or move to another room, means less product sales in general.   Even then meeting the requirement also sends the message that Sonos soundbars don’t play music well enough on their own.  Not the message they want to send.  Lastly, Sonos is pushing toward more atmos music, which obviously negates the need to split the home theatre setup.  And these are Sonos goals that we know of.  There could be other features they have planned that don’t work your feature request.

I don’t really care if they implement this or not.  As other have said though, it does not seem like it will happen anytime soon.

No-one said it had to be quick, but if you can manually do it, Sonos could if they wanted to, automate the process. If it allowed different Trueplay settings depending on the configuration by also saving and changing them that would improve the process a fair bit beyond the manual reconfigure. 

They could also, through the soundbar, send a stereo signal to the surrounds and include the sub. No radio reconfiguration required, the soundbar would just send a stereo signal to the speakers and play nothing itself. You might restrict that to sources not coming via HDMI, so you don’t have to worry about lip sync, but that route would require probably a fair bit more work than automating existing manual setup steps. 

At the moment they just don’t want to. It’s something that gets requested here a few times. 

Unlike others I’m not going to tell people how they should listen to their kit, that’s going to be wildly different for many people. What Sonos need to get back to is giving people as much flexibility as they can to allow customers to do that. It’s the little things like that which elevate an ecosystem beyond just a set of speakers and encourages people to invest more and maybe even recommend it to others. 

Sonos seem to have blown that away with the new app with all sorts of user friendly elements just vanishing. I’m afraid there has been a culture change with the new app, and despite the latest corporate proclamations, I’m not sure Sonos will go back to where they were without just chasing short term goals, hence my suggestion on Google/Apple. Nothing to do with Sonos going bust if they don’t implement this feature…. thanks for the laughs!  Google/Apple would like to be a lot more active in this space, and would do a much better job on the software IMO.

So let me get this straight:   Sonos has recently undergone a “culture change” because they haven’t implemented something which has been requested since the very first soundbar they produced over a decade ago? 

Solid logic right there.  

And nobody said it had to be quick in this thread, but there are dozens of others where people said it would have to be a “quick toggle”.

No - culture change in the way they have gone in general with the new app. 

What does that have to do with this thread subject?  This thread is about a feature that has been requested for over a decade, not about the new app.  

 yikes, requested for over a decade, that’s a really bummer. Also a bummer to see people side with sonos on the concept of somehow adding flexibility makes it harder to sell more speakers. For me, rather than buying more speakers, had I known this was an impossibility I wouldnt have bought six sonos speakers this year, and had I discovered this strange limitation earlier I would have promptly returned them and went elsewhere. 

Maybe the culture change will eventually reach newer ears at the company on the SW side that say, “we can do that” and this feature gets implemented to expand the product’s appeal without adding the manufacturing costs of new hardware. SW is a great ROI in that way, add feature, widen the appeal, more customers buy in to the ecosystem. Rather than trying to sell two more speakers to existing customer.  If not, I’ll just keep it the way it is, soundbar only for TV, surrounds and sub configured for line-in and stereo music in the meantime 

As mentioned already, this would only be a partial solution to the request.   OP wanted to be able to use the line in feature of the surrounds as well, which would not work with this solution.  And although OP didn’t request this themselves, this request is often paired with the desire to move your surrounds to another room, out of reliable 5GHZ range of the ‘master’ soundbar, or to quickly bond the sub to entirely different speakers.

I would agree that putting in settings to allow audio playback of surround speakers only(perhaps with trueplay settings), or to allow ‘full stereo’ mode for TV stereo sources seems like an easy win, but it won’t satisfy all the requirements.

I don’t see anyone telling people how to use their stuff.  People are stating that what they envision as an easy then to modify technically may not be that easy, or what configuration they believe will sound good won’t actually sound good, or what feature they believe everybody wants isn’t actually what people want. 

As far as flexibility in the speakers encouraging people to buy more speakers, that is not always the case.  For this speaker feature, for example, giving people to use the same speakers in multiple configurations, perhaps multiple rooms, can actually encourage them to buy fewer speakers, so they don’t need extra speaker for those other configurations and rooms.  Yes, they may buy those additional speakers anyway, perhaps for other rooms in the house or whatever the reason may be, but it’s not always the case that a more flexible speaker increases sales.

I don’t know that Sonos could go back to the way they were simply because of that the wireless home theatre market is much more competitive than it was back them.   Sonos clearly has made some bad choices recently, but people rarely look back and consider where they would be if they had chosen to do nothing, or look at the risks they took that actually panned out for them in the past.

I don’t know that Google/Apple/Amazon really want to be more active in wireless home audio.  It’s been years now, since the entered the market in various ways at various levels, but there has been little in the way of competing products from tech giants.  Apple has had their HomePods, which they had to cancel and rerelease, only works with Apple sources, etc.  Amazon has their echo products, which only does streaming audio, has limited functionality, and really doesn’t match Sonos audio quality.  Google is pretty much the same as Amazon in that regard.  If they are interested in this space, why haven’t they fully entered the market with similar effort that they have put into other markets?  Perhaps they are waiting for Sonos older patents to expire, so they don’t have to buy them.  In the case of Apple, maybe they don’t want another audio brand, and don’t want Sonos more open system that doesn’t match their typical way of doing things.  Maybe these companies don’t really want to be audio companies, they just want to stick with voice assistants, AI, and their other core competencies. 

If you had gone elsewhere instead of Sonos where would you go?  I’m not aware of any wireless home theatre system that has this feature.  It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at wired setups, but I don’t recall this feature being available, much less common, back then.   I could very well be wrong about this, but I’m not you can call the lack of this feature as strange without showing that it’s common in other speaker systems.

People keep squawking about a “culture change” amongst developers at Sonos due to the fiasco over the new app.  When by all accounts, the development team was warning management (I believe the quote is they were “'yelling' and 'screaming' in meetings”) that the app was not fit for purpose.  They were apparently overridden by other departments.  People blaming the lack of “half decent application developers” are ignoring this fact in their unbridled wrath, and their blame is sincerely misplaced.  Best to just ignore the furor and look at the facts.