Can you create preset groupings?

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.