Insteon Control of Sonos Stereo Pair

  • 27 November 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 483 views

I've had some luck setting up Insteon keypad switches to control some audio functions, such as play, pause, and volume. It's neat to have a physical button on the wall I can push to adjust the volume or switch it off when the music gets so loud that Alexa can't hear me.

However, I've noticed that when trying to program the buttons to control a stereo pair, that things start to get weird. Namely, after trying to program that into the switch to address either the left speaker or the right, it simply doesn't work. To get the switch to work again with another non-stereo pair, I have to delete the scene and start over.

Has anybody else had any success or failures in getting their Insteon and Sonos working together?

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3 replies

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My house came with in-wall speakers in several rooms and they have an old school dial volume control. I just switched over to SONOS and am adding a Connect:Amp to drive these speakers. Any way to control individual room volume through the SONOS app by replacing the switches?
@scottredd, Not sure if you are still monitoring or still care about your question. Regardless, I'm not sure I understand. it sounds like you want to independently control the volume or other aspects of the individual speakers in a stereo pair. This isn't a feature, through the app or any other interface. Not surprising because that pretty much the standard way things operate. If it's a must feature, you might want to look at breaking up the pair.

@rgo4, you can control the volume through the app with the switches in place, it's just not ideal. Kind of hard to explain the app volume control and switch control are not aware of the current volume settting, so it's easy to get messed up. If you don't really care about the switches, you can removed them, wire the speaker wire together, and put a blank wall plate over it all. That way, you're using the app to control volume only. If you want to use the app and a wall switch at the same time, but have them be 'smart', there are other 3rd party products you can by. For example, the Lutron pico remote (with Lutron hub) can control sonos volume as well as pause and skip tracks. This can easily be mounted on the wall. (I have a couple myself, but I don't really use them much. I got the Lutron hub primarily for lighting control). I haven't really researched it much, but it looks insteon has something similar, and surely a handful of other products are out there.
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@melvimble thanks for the reply. I get that I can use the SONOS app to control the volume on the entire system. That is what I did with my old AV Receiver before I switched to SONOS. I turned the volume switch in each room all the way up and just used the receiver's volume to control the whole house.

I would love to have some way to (preferable through the SONOS app) to break these into independent rooms. I will look into Lutron as I may be able to get that to talk to Apple's HomeKit. Ultimately I want to be able to tell Siri to play music in room X...