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Connect PC to Ray

  • 15 August 2022
  • 9 replies
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Hi,

I have a PC connected to a videoprojector, and I want to link it remotely to a Ray soundbar. Can I use a Sonos Port connected to the PC, which will then link up with the soundbar ?

Thanx !

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Best answer by ratty 17 August 2022, 12:20

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9 replies

This is not advisable.

Firstly you’d lose any 5.1 surround information, as the input to a Port would be stereo only.

But also you’d suffer a minimum 75ms delay when using a Line-In, which you may not be able to compensate for in the PC or projector.

I’d suggest you look at getting the optical signal from the PC to the Ray somehow. If the distance is excessive then there are optical extender kits which use Cat5/6 (Ethernet) cable.

 

Thank you. Home Theater with Sonos really is a bit of a pain.

About the delay, I thought you could correct for it in the app ?

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You seem to have chosen a quite eccentric set up for your HT: a PC combined with a projector. Sonos specializes in set ups where a TV is the central hub for the system, with sometimes a BD-player, provider STB or Apple TV thrown in as a source. The fact that Sonos does not cater to all tastes in home cinema does to me not qualify their set ups as “a pain”.

You can set the delay to the minimum of 75 seconds, that Sonos needs for buffering. You can’t make it go away.

About the delay, I thought you could correct for it in the app ?

Despite its many capabilities the Sonos app cannot yet achieve time travel, which is what it would take to bring the audio forward.

To maintain lip-sync the picture would have to be delayed, in the PC or (less likely) the projector.

You seem to have chosen a quite eccentric set up for your HT:

Well, there is a whole lot of people using wireless projectors for their Home Cinema, with or without a PC, and it is a fact that Sonos products are not a viable solution for them, at least not without a pretty complex wired installation. Which defeats the purpose of a wireless projector. So I stand by my comment. All the more so that you can set up wireless Home Cinema Audio pretty easily with a lot of other solutions.

Does your projector support Airplay 2? There are also some inexpensive BT to TOSLINK receivers..

Does your projector support Airplay 2? There are also some inexpensive BT to TOSLINK receivers..

The projector is not compatible, but the PC could be. And that would take care of the delay ? Same question for the receivers, but since they connect to the optical port, I guess it’s OK.

A Bluetooth connection would inject a delay of around 40ms using aptX Low Latency. Any other codec could be much worse. To this would be added the Ray’s internal delay of 30ms for its optical input. 70ms overall would be noticeable.

In the case of Airplay it’s the sending device which needs to compensate for the transmission latency, by delaying the video. Apple kit would do so; I’d be surprised if a PC could.

As others have noted, this really isn’t the typical TV-soundbar application that Sonos is designed for.

Yeah, I see that. So, I guess my only solution in my particular case, is to configure the appropriate video delay on my playback app.