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advice on setup, same speakers on different groups?

  • 30 November 2020
  • 4 replies
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Hi.

After years of mediocre sound, I bought an arc, sub and two One SL speakers for surround. But I didn’t really do much research on Sonos functionality, hope you can help me out a bit.

Just to paint a small picture:

We have a pretty large living room, TV about 7 meters from the sofa, bedrooms are closer to the arc than the sofa. For me to enjoy music or TV sound without waking up the family early morning or late at night, I was ideally hoping that the One SL speakers could “take over” and be the only active speakers if I wanted them to. Making the arc and sub mute actually. Is that possible somehow? Also I would love if I could stream my music to the One SL speakers only if I wanted. As far as I see from searches and other replies, this is not achievable at the moment? I was hoping these topics were old and there’s some news on this. Could I make the One SL speakers as one group (sofa), arc and sub another group (TV), and these groups to play the same thing if we want, but able to stream music to the “sofa” group alone for instance?
 

also related to this; Do Sonos have an “idea” list for customers to vote on functionality?

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Best answer by nik9669a 30 November 2020, 09:23

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As you say, many have asked… Currently you would have to unbond the rears, set them up as a stereo pair in a “new” room (really just a label for identifying them), and then rebond them when you want surround again. Your grouping idea will not give you 5.1 for movies. You can set a balance between Arc and surrounds to bias in favour of the Ones when playing music. 

First, I assume that for music you have surrounds set to ‘Full’ not ‘Ambient’.

As @nik9669a suggests, if you go into the settings for your Arc, Surround Audio, then whack the ‘music level’ up high, you might get an acceptable result.  Won’t help with movies though.

As you say, many have asked… Currently you would have to unbond the rears, set them up as a stereo pair in a “new” room (really just a label for identifying them), and then rebond them when you want surround again. Your grouping idea will not give you 5.1 for movies. You can set a balance between Arc and surrounds to bias in favour of the Ones when playing music. 


Ah, ok. Thanks for the tip, I’ll check if that’s something we can live with.. anyway, sounds like this should be possible to expand on for Sonos software wise.. setup rooms or groups with whatever speakers you want, then pair the rooms/groups themselves as a “TV/Home Theater/Surround group”, the groups could then function as 1 room/group. Then just activate/deactivate this function as needed.

 

anywaaaay.. The system sounds great, just too bad you can’t mix and match as you want with these groups..

It's not as simple as you think. Surround speakers connect by a different process know as bonding. It's not as simple as grouping. It's a complete reconfiguration of the connections.

You can achieve what you want by going through that reconfiguration. Sonos might be able to reduce the button clicks required, but I suspect not the process itself or how long it takes.