AirPlay 2 with Sonos PlayBar 5.1 and two Sonos One's as surrounds

Hey ShermanThruGA,

We spoke about this in another thread here, but for anyone new to the conversation, the Playbar, Playbase, or Beam in a surround sound setup will determine Airplay2 compatibility. That speaker is the one that does all the heavy lifting and handles controlling what audio is sent where. If you had a Sonos One, you could send the Airplay 2 signal to it and group the Sonos One with your Playbar (not bonded as surround speakers), and they'd play the same thing.

Ok, sorry to be this person whining on forums about things not being exactly how I want but...if I’m understanding this right, it seems like really terrible implementation. I entirely get why the playbar as older tech doesn’t support AirPlay2. But now having two sonos ones linked to it as surround sound also isn’t a solution? i bought them instead of the cheaper play 1s assuming it was good future proofing for exactly this purpose.

Is it really the case that, assuming I don’t upgrade two playbars for bases, my only fixes are either to buy a third One for both rooms with playbars to create a group, or to decouple the Ones from the playbars so that I no longer have the surround sound experience? The first seems like madness, and the second defeats the purpose for which I bought this combo of equipment.

I get the frustration, but you can't really blame Sonos for implementing their 5.1 system this way. It was designed and created years ago before airplay 2 was even a thought. Putting all the heavy lifting in the playbar was the right choice, since you couldn't have a 5.1 system without it, it would always have audio input, and it would save costs(and price) in the other speakers.

And of course, they can't redesign how it works now. Even if the involved speakers had the right hardware, it would not a lot of development work, testing, and intrduce bugs into funtions that have been error free for years.

Another option idea is to buy 2play:1sfor one ofyour 5.1 setups. That way you now can re purpuse the 2 Sonos Ones to other roomsin the house, separately or as a stereo pair. If separately, then you can have 2 airplay streams going at the same time.

You could also look into getting an apple TV to steeam through.

Yeah, I know there might be reasons for it. But if I start music using Alexa with the One, the whole combo takes it. Different use case of course because I’m not actually sending music to the One when it’s initiated that way, so I shouldn’t have assumed the AirPlay potential would work the same. Just annoying because I’ve now sunk more money in a system for functionality i won’t have. my dreams of finally ditching the dreaded Sonos app are in ruins!


And I did think after my initial post about changing the speakers attached to one of the surrounds, but it’s just redundant to introduce two more speakers that aren’t going to offer any advantages in terms of sound quality. a shortage of them around the house isn’t an issue! Cheers for the suggestion though.

If it helps, when using voice control, you are sending a command to the cloud, which will then instruct the playbar to stream music as normal. The Sonos One will play the 'slave' role while you are streaming music.

As i understand it, with airplay, you are streaming directly from your phone to the device, with the device required to have a lot of memory available for buffering the audio. Playbar doesn't have that much memory. So if it were to theortically work, your sonos one, it would have to receive the stream from your phone, send the stream to the playbar for processing, and the receive a stream back from the playbar with only it's part of the audio. Sonos doesn't have the hardware to do all that.

Of course, if the Sonos One is not part of rhe playbar setup, then it doesn't need to receive a stream back from the playbar.

Right. As soon as I thought about it, it became obvious that it wasn’t the case that AirPlay would work the same as streaming music to the surround sound combo. Unfortunately, it just hadn’t occurred to me to question my assumptions. I’m not blaming the company either, and in the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. Just means I’ve got some choices to make about whether to upgrade to play bases or think about other AirPlay 2 compatible options.

What a ripoff! How disingenuous. I literally sold two Play:1 I had as sureounds and replaced with Ones based on your BS marketing statements. You really expected consumers to parse this and differentiate the technical differences between pairing, grouping, adding, etc? What a waste of time. I feel like an idiot for having you in every room of my house including bathrooms. That’s about to change. Better options for TVs anyway.

I need two playbars badly but wont buy them until this issue is resolved. I can feel everyones pain here and these speakers are not cheap.

I'm in the same boat. I bought the Playbar and the Sonos Ones and I saw that Airplay 2 was coming.... then I saw the beam come out.... Super frustrating.

What is my cheapest move to be able to get airplay 2 working? I'm paticularly interested in just being able to play from the podcast app on an iPhone to my sonos system. I hate navigating through the sonos app to find a podcast.

If setting up with tv and surrounds. ... beam

Just stand alone speaker Sonos One