Adding 7.1, 9.1, etc. to Playbase/Playbar

So the short answer is: I'm correct?? LOL

Saying Sonos isn't a 'proper' home cinema system is just a meaninglessly disparaging comment. You are perfectly entitled of course to continue to highlight its limitations at every opportunity if you wish.

I really agree with John here. It's becoming a bit boring to click on a thread and know what a post by a certain user will say without even having to read it. It is a Sonos forum after all, and not a generic AV one, so constantly bashing it (as opposed to having a discussion) seems in bad taste.

One point I'd like to reiterate is that if you're really into your various codecs and lossless home cinema audio, I cannot understand why Sonos is even an option for you. I mean it doesn't even stream 24bit lossless for music, so why anyone expects it do more than DD5.1 is beyond me. They've made it very clear their audience is the streamers, and not the hi-res disc watchers.

People are coming here for buying advice, such as "should I buy a PLAYBAR?" or "will PLAYBAR meet my needs?".

If everybody just said "woo, yeah, PLAYBAR is great/flawless/perfect" they wouldn't really be receiving the balanced advice they came for.

I've been a big fan of Sonos for over 12 years of ownership, but that doesn't mean I can't offer constructive criticism where appropriate. I was an early adopter of Sonos in the UK, buying imported kit from overseas before it was even launched here. Back in 2004 it was groundbreaking and truly ahead of its time. But that didn't mean I couldn't highlight product weaknesses and suggest ways it could be improved.

Like the little white LED light on the front of the original players, they're on the top of the newer speaker products. There is an option in the settings to turn these lights off, do you know why? Because I said it lit my bedroom up at night and was a flaw on an otherwise perfect product. I fed back, Sonos fixed it.

Sonos couldn't play Apple Lossless audio, so when I ripped all my CDs in ALAC, Sonos kit couldn't play them. They can now, because I told them it was broken.

The biggest fans of footballs teams don't sit back and applaud when their team is losing. They criticise and suggest ways of improving. Armchair critics are something critical to success in many ways. It's why they get invited to product trials and launch events where you end up in discussion with senior management and product designers who ask "you're a big fan, what would you do?".

A friend of mine, whom I introduced to Sonos, was responsible for allowing the mute button on Sonos to become play/pause. Why? Because he told them it could be better and they listened.

In the case of this thread, the OP asks if PLAYBAR/PLAYBASE is capable of modern cinema audio. It isn't and never can be, but should we sit back and tell him it is? "Go ahead, buy the speaker, I'm sure it will be capable of 7.1 at some point in the future".

No, we need to be honest. People are spending around £2000 on 5.1 set-ups which don't deliver as much as systems costing 25% less. I know, I've got both.

They don't need to be audiophiles, they just need to be people who want their kids to be able to put the latest Disney or Star Wars blu-ray on and not be faced with silent audio. People who don't want their wives to phone them at the office and say "sorry to interrupt but we're trying to watch something and there's no sound again."

This has been my life for many years and, to be frank, I'm glad to see the back of it. PLAYBAR never really met my needs but I've lived through years of ownership due to having a young family and a right budget.

It's approaching five years since PLAYBAR went on sale, the buyers felt it met they're needs at the time - why else buy it? But five years is a long time in tech, especially without a model refresh. Within five years, many are replacing their TVs, blu-ray players and may even be ready to lift that living room carpet to replace it. A perfect time to drop in a few speaker wires and do away with their problematic "wireless" system and its chunky power cables.

Call it bashing, disparaging, boring or whatever. I just call it being honest and it's what I would expect myself if I came here looking for advice on what to buy or whether a product was capable of specific functions.

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?

You appear to have strayed completely off topic and are now making assuming about who I am and decisions I have made without any background knowledge or indeed accuracy. Trust me, you haven't a clue about the extensive research I have made here.

Tom526 - you are indeed correct and, on that note, I think this thread has run its course.

If there is one category of consumer that Sonos has never targeted it is those who self-identify as 'audiophiles'.


Isn't "self-identify" a redundancy? A person can identify as an audiophile, Native American, Jedi, whatever. So what is "self-identify"?

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.

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?

Wow -- A lot of words in here and probably more tech and banter than the average Joe is looking for. I think I can boil it down for someone considering Sonos.

They sound great!
They are easy to "install".

Unfortunately if you want them for home theater, you better like 1990's movies. Fewer and fewer blu rays have DD5.1 as an option so you're paying a lot of money for stereo sound*. 5.1 is fine with me, but I can't even get that anymore. Until Sonos addresses this, they are quickly making themselves obsolete in the home theater market. They need to wake up before they are the next Blackberry (1990's reference) and have to try to reinvent themselves as software.

*Yes you can find audio signal converters but then you're paying even more money to downgrade and remain stuck in the 1990's. Who spends more money to downgrade a service???

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