Adding 7.1, 9.1, etc. to Playbase/Playbar

I don’t really care if someone posts something positive or negative about Sonos. But it does seem odd to me to cross post the exact same thing on 5 different threads over the past week. I myself post a mixture of opinions. I think the Play 3 has middling sound quality and poor value for money, the Play 5 (whilst great sound) is insanely expensive. The Play 1 is outstanding value for money and incredible sound. The 5.1 setup is CRAZY expensive as I mentioned in the first of our discussions. But, it does do a good job for most people, and feed it an appropriate signal, and it can decode away very well.

In the UK - Freeview broadcasts max out at 5.1, Sky only does 5.1, and Netflix does 5.1, 5.1+ and ONE title in Atmos. Sky and BT will both do sport in Atmos, but what I found interesting was that even Sky’s own new soundbar doesn’t support Atmos! Until we see wholesale changes for the majority of broadcasts then I don’t think we can have a discussion about Sonos being “incompatible”. ITV maxes out at 2.0 for now, and even iPlayer doesn’t bother to do 5.1.

From what I can tell, it seems you invested in something without doing much research or without realising what you wanted. Suddenly worked out you had an affinity for hi-res codecs, realised neither your TV nor your DVD player were Sonos-friendly and then keep blaming Sonos for not supporting them. You want to hide wires, but for obvious reasons can’t shove a power cable into the walls. You seem to be the total antithesis of someone who should have invested in Sonos. I’m not sure that’s their fault. Before I invested in my setup, I checked the sources I would be most using, ran checks on the TV when it arrived to make sure it passed through 5.1 both internally and externally before mounting. It always astounds me when I see people posting about how they just dropped 2k on new Sonos gear but didn’t realise their TV doesn’t work properly with it.

You keep espousing the virtues of having a fancy quote-unquote “proper” wired setup, but don’t even have your own speakers placed properly, instead dumping them on the middle shelf of your AV Unit all next to each other. And I caveat again, I have both 5.0 Sonos setups x2 and what you regard as a “proper” wired setup. Day to day the Sonos 5.0 setups do a great job. For anything “serious” (e.g. the GoT finale) I switch to the main wired setup. Anyway I think we all know your thoughts on Sonos and it’s support (or lack thereof) of codecs right now. I’m not sure there’s a requirement to mention it in all threads.

And finally finally, doesn’t the new Denon Heos Bar (NOT the Soundbar) literally do what the few posters in this thread want? You can expand it to 5.1 using Heos “wireless” speakers, it decodes all the hi-res codecs, has multiple HDMI inputs, you can do multiroom, etc?

I don’t really care if someone posts something positive or negative about Sonos. But it does seem odd to me to cross post the exact same thing on 5 different threads over the past week. I myself post a mixture of opinions. I think the Play 3 has middling sound quality and poor value for money, the Play 5 (whilst great sound) is insanely expensive. The Play 1 is outstanding value for money and incredible sound. The 5.1 setup is CRAZY expensive as I mentioned in the first of our discussions. But, it does do a good job for most people, and feed it an appropriate signal, and it can decode away very well.

Take a look at my posts these past couple of years, you'll see I've said precisely the same thing as you have. When I originally bought my 5.1 kit, it came with Play 3. They sounded lifeless whether I used them as a stereo pair or as part of the HT. I traded them off and bought a pair of Play 1. Much better speaker, much better value.

Doesn’t the new Denon Heos Bar (NOT the Soundbar) literally do what the few posters in this thread want? You can expand it to 5.1 using Heos “wireless” speakers, it decodes all the hi-res codecs, has multiple HDMI inputs, you can do multiroom, etc?

It covers just about all of it: Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS - but it doesn't work with Atmos. I don't know enough about Atmos to know if it thats a deal breaker, but at the rate it seems to be picking up steam I might as well look at Atmos-able stuff.

Atmos is backwards compatible, and the metadata is contained within the TrueHD stream. So if you feed, say, an AV receiver from around 2015 that was compatible with the lossless codecs but NOT advanced enough for Atmos, it would ignore Atmos and give you a TrueHD output. What it won't do, however, is give you a DD 5.1 sound since that is not embedded within the stream. Another way of saying this is if you feed an Atmos signal to the Playbar, you'll get silence.

To complicate things further, DTS HD-MA is slightly different in that it does contain a lossy DTS track in it's core. So, again, if you feed an older receiver with DTS HD-MA that isn't built to decode it, you'll get standard DTS.


So at the very least, any DTS higher codec will come out as vanilla DTS, but the best you'll get out of Atmos is TrueHD? No chance there's an AVR out there that will transcode down to DD5.1?

Now that a new playbar is in development with HDMI, would it be a possibility to do 7.1 ?

Sonos hasn't admitted a "new playbar" is in development, it is only speculation because of an FCC filing. Given that, do you really expect them to fill in the details?

I have been reading constantly about what Sonos is or isn't capable of supporting. I do know even some newer movies, have the capability to set the audio out to 5.1 dolby digital. I have seen that setting in the Last Jedi Movie on Blu-Ray, that is the most recent movie I own. I plan on getting the playbar in the future, because I want a speaker that does music streaming in our house mainly, the Home Theater aspect is a bonus in my mind. I am content using my TV Speakers on the TV I bought three years ago. I also think it would be overkill in my living room, since I own an older house with two doorways to go through the house, so it wouldn't make sense for me to have that setup in my house, one of the big reasoning I am going for a sound bar that sound good, according to most reviews I have read.