Can you create preset groupings?

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. 

So, in summary:

 - it is possible to go through the (tedious) manual process of de-bonding surrounds and set them up as a stereo pair;

 - it’s been asked for many times over an extended period of time;

 - the actual manual process takes a while;

 - re-bonding them to revert to a home theatre system is also a tedious process, and this too takes some time;

 - an automated process is desirable to some users.
 

To automate this, it will need every combination of soundbars (and Playbase) and every possible surround speakers to be tested. Then test again with each Sub generation. Then test again for 2-Sub systems, and again for soundbars with and without surrounds but with Subs. 
 

At the end, I would guess that less than 1% of Sonos’ user base will use the feature. 
 

To me, that doesn’t sound like a good use of engineering time. 
 

Or, it encourages Sonos to have a 2-tier app. Sonos Lite for basic functionality, and a second all-singing and dancing version for which they charge an annual fee. 

Danny you are getting way far afoot from my original request. I have no desire to move speakers around to different rooms. I just want the ability to save config for Era100+sub with line-in or  a full surround setup with the Beam.  Speakers would remain in place and previous Trueplay eq and delay settings could remain as they were for each config, just recalled when you reconfigure. 

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. 

As a new adopter, fact is I would be less likely to have bought this system at all, and even would have returned it had I known easily upfront about this. I would have in no way just thought, “gee I’ll buy more speakers for this, yeah, two era100’s one behind the next will do it, this way I can fully use something they sell as an accessory, a phonograph, with my system” They would have lost an entire customer with an eco-system buy-in vs somehow seeing it as more lucrative to sell two more speakers to an existing customer. I dont think this is a logical reason to limit software functionality. 

You might be correct that it is a niche request for the over all group of ownership, but that’s what a feature request is. A “fit my niche” ask floated to see if more people have the same desire. Seeing as it’s been requested for years perhaps it’s less the niche than it seems on face value. 

@tnprime . You are of course entitled to request a feature, and I can certainly understand why you would like this feature.

I was the person who introduced the idea of an extra pair of speakers for music, as part of what was intended to be a joke. 

Sonos soundbars are designed to be good for music as well as home theatre.  With surround speakers, you have the option of "dual stereo". With a bit of manipulation  you can get most of the sound out of your Eras. That may not float your boat but it is going to keep some of the niche happy, I would have thought. 

I can see that the line-in would remain an issue for you, but I think we are now in the territory of niche within a niche.

FWIW, I think you could probably send the output of your turntable to your Beam via a switch or two, depending on what outputs the turntable has 

But my key thought is that many people buy a Sonos soundbar precisely because it is better at music than most soundbars, and so kills two birds with one stone. Some of your comments seem to imply you don't think it can even play music. 

“Been requested for years” does not mean “been requested often”.  It crops up once in a while, but by no means is it something which has people burning up the request line.  And you may not be asking for the ability to move speakers to another room or assign a Sub to another room, but there have been some who do.  So your request becomes even more niche if you aren’t covering all functions that fall under the “we want to easily reconfigure surround sound” umbrella. 

I also posit that if you are looking for a wireless multi-room home theater system which allows you to easily reconfigure home theater rooms into other uses, you aren’t going to find one.  There are only a few out there, and they don’t even reach Sonos’ level of flexibility.  

I acknowledged that you don’t have the desire to move speakers around.  My point was that set of people who want this feature want the feature so they can move speakers around.  When those that have been around for awhile say that it’s a feature that’s been requested for years, they are including those that want it for speaker movement purposes.  Your specific request is more of a subset of the larger request, in that many people in the group would still not be satisfied if Sonos met your specific request.

It’s been mentioned before, but the biggest issue, in your specific request is the need to use the line in on one of the sound speakers.   Sending audio to different speakers in different scenarios is not a big challenge as the speakers that make up the room already do this in other scenarios.  However, the soundbar is always the master who processes the audio and sends to other speakers, and how the networking is set up.  Changing that is significant.  I suspect, and there are rumors, that the next soundbar Sonos releases will have it’s own bluetooth and line in capabilities, which would obviously have an impact on the desire to use surround sound speakers for line in input.  

I don’t personally use line in often, but if I do want to play a line source in the home theatre setup, I just connect to a speaker in a different room and group with the home theatre.   And yes, I get that many people don’t have a 2nd Sonos room, or want to spend money to buy another speaker...but that also goes against the idea that having more flexiblity in the configurations will always sell more speakers.

There are surely many customers who look at it the way you do, but there are also many who won’t buy new speakers if they can more easily move speakers around.  Or they will just play stereo music out of the soundbar, which is obviously very common.  My point was that you can’t conclude that adding this feature will definitely result in more speaker sales just because it would have worked for you.

Perhaps worth noting that Sonos speakers used to not include bluetooth connections at all, and the only device with line in were the Fives, Port, and Amp (in their earlier forms).  Only recently has Sonos expanded the feature to other speakers, and maybe all speakers going forward.