Can you create preset groupings?

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. 

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.