Different room configuration for TV and music modes

Not easily, no. Basically, in order to do that, you'd need to unbond the surround speakers and SUB from your PLAYBAR every time you wanted to play music with them, and then rebond them to the PLAYBAR when you wanted to watch TV. And if you're in to TruePlay, that would have to be done every time as well.

Many of us on the boards have just gone in to settings for the room that has the PLAYBAR in it, and set the surrounds to be on "Full" rather than "Ambient", so that they act as stereo speakers on their own, and listen to them with the PLAYBAR included. Note that in the same area, you can set the volume of them for both music and TV purposes, so perhaps you might turn them all the way up, so that relative to the PLAYBAR, they'd be much louder?

Seriously, this is on my wish list as well. The ability to turn off or mute the bar in a 5.1 setup. Same way you can the sub.

Come on Sonos, Pees ( as my kid would say)

thanks bruce, the "full" setting helps. however, a feature toggle would be really nice and definitely not hard to implement, hoping sonos is watching their forum as well.

btw is there something like a roadmap where we see what the guys are working on?

Heh. First, you're welcome, and second, I'm not one of "those guys".

But no, they don't share a roadmap. We all get the joy of surprise when they release things. Oh, sure, they've pre-announced three things that I'm aware of (Apple Music, Spotify app integration, and Amazon Echo/Alexa integration) but for the most part, they don't make any promises. Which I get, it keeps these boards relatively free of the "you promised X, and it hasn't been shipped yet" kind of posts. Having been in my fair share of software development and planning, priorities change due to outside influences, so it's difficult to keep to a pre-announced schedule, especially when things pop up unexpectedly.

But you've got my support for that toggle, to be sure 🙂

ok I found a small workaround that will work for me I guess. in advanced audio settings you can increase the level for the surround speakers when in music mode, and leave them on normal for TV mode. when sliding it all the way to the right and listening to music, I can barely hear the playbar but when switching to TV, the sound is well-balanced.

annoying side note, volume delta between TV and music increases so everytime you switch between modes you'll have to adjust the volume.

I am sorry but you have no idea whether this would be easy to implement. I suspect you vastly underestimate the complexity involved in the system. You are probably also unaware that the way in which the surround setup passes data is completely different from what happens when a stereo pair plus Sub are set to play music.

I would like to see this feature too. I suspect Sonos would too. But if it was trivially easy they would have done it.