None of the Sonos home theatre speakers allow you to add separate L and R speakers at the front. They already contain the front L/R (and C) channels.

As for setting up a pair as a separate ‘room’, grouped with the Playbar, this will be okay for music but out of sync for TV audio. This would indeed sound terrible. Fiddling with the Playbar’s lipsync adjustment could bring them roughly into step, but since it would delay the Playbar’s sound it would probably ruin the sync with the TV picture.

Can’t understand why you wouldn’t have researched this beforehand. To do what you want you need a receiver, for those of us who can’t be bothered or don’t want the hassle, Sonos works brilliantly.

When you buy something do you have to research all of the faults and the limitations? Why would you even think that you couldn’t add a pair of 5’s at the front? Doesn’t say that you can’t do it on the website. Says you can add them as surround speakers? Why would you add them at the rear. Makes no sense. Minds made up they are going back. Sell the play bar, sub and 2 x play 1’s which I purchased in the last year with a view to doing this. And purchase a real system. This wasn't the cheap option and it is only software. No reason why it couldn't be achieved to improve the system performance. 

With a technical product, of course. It’s called ‘caveat emptor’. 

And Sonos is even generous enough to let you return a product for weeks after purchase, for whatever reason, if it doesn’t suit.

Vendors market the actual features, not what a product can’t do.

One would imagine that Ferrari would be more inclined to say “goes fast”, than “unsuitable for crossing a ploughed field”…

... other than the business rationale, or lack of it, for doing so, and the small matter of the engineering effort required to implement it.

Been a sonos fan from the beginning. From my first gen play 5 thru to today. But this situation makes no sense when a simple software change would make sonos even better. For the rationale in doing so, why spend time and money bringing out a new sonos 5 with almost no benefits over the play 5 when you could do this simple software update. It’s not difficult and there is a business case for it. 
so I’m off to do my full due diligence on a proper 7.1 system, because that’s progress. 

I’m sorry to have to point this out so bluntly, but unless you have intimate inside knowledge of the Sonos software architecture and overall business plans you have no basis for these assertions whatsoever.

Ratty, never judge a book by its cover. I run a company that writes software and develops architecture, so i know what would be involved, and trust me, its not a big job. Not as big as developing a new product and bringing it to market, with no clear benefits. Being able to add a pair of 5’s to the front of a 5.1 system would have been an improvement. They wrote the software to make them a stereo pair, wouldn’t have taken much else. Putting it bluntly, unnless you work at Sonos, what is your knowledge based on?

I don’t require any such knowledge. I’m not the one claiming it’s easy or that there’s a competitive business case for such a development. 

Yes, it would be a nice-to-have feature, and indeed I’ve been one of those requesting it in the past. 

But don’t let us fall into the trap of believing it’s just a case of “only” putting the 0s and 1s in the right order, or that there isn’t a better use of those engineering resources.