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How make a surround config good for music?

  • 8 January 2024
  • 6 replies
  • 175 views
S

I’ve just received new speakers for my living room. 2 Era 100 and Sub Mini. Since before I have a ray connected to my TV because it turned out that the TV I bought a year ago had terrible sound. My use case for the new speakers is listening to music. Don’t care that much about surround sound for the TV but okey if it comes in the package without messing up sound quality for music. 
 

When installing the new speakers it ended up as a surround set up with the ray sound bar. As default when playing music it mainly used the ray and the Era speakers as some kind of “mood managers”. Not at all my intention. I want Era as stereopairs preferably without the ray in the mix at all. 
 

 To improve the situation I’ve changed surround settings in two ways:

  1. Changed music setting to “Full”
  2. adjusted music level to +15

It makes the system behave a bit more as expected and sound did improve, ray is still playing though. So I’m closer to what I’ve been after, but after playing around a bit with settings I’ve found another very odd behavior.

The Sub is hardly making any noise. Moving the setting between -15 and +15 makes a difference but much less than I’m used to. When the sub setting is at 0 and I turn off the sub the bass is increasing drastically and the sound becomes more “punshy”. At first I thought the toggle worked in the wrong way since sound had opposite effect from expected. If I put the sub setting at +10 I get around the same “level” of bass with sub as without sub. Without sub the sound is a bit more “punshy” and more midrange, with sub a bit deeper bass but more soft/plain sound. 
 

I’m quite confused and wonder if this whole surround set up makes music sound worse. Is Sub Mini a useless speaker in the mix? In my other apartment I got the normal sub and Sonos one x2. Very happy with that sound. 
 

My questions I guess is.

  1. To get best possible sound quality for music. Should I install the system in a different way? Maybe without the Ray? My tweeks from default might have messed it up even if default was terrible to listen to. 
  2. Anything else I can do to make the sub mini to really contribute to a full sound?

I did do true play calibration in the beginning of the set up as well.

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Best answer by nik9669a 8 January 2024, 20:42

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6 replies

N
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Sonos is very reconfigurable. If you don’t like the sound when you have the home theatre 5.1 setup, try setting your Ray to be in one “room” - maybe called Video, and the Eras as a stereo pair called Music. Try bonding the Sub Mini to one, then the other. Go with what you like best. 

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Remove Surrounds:  https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/remove-surround-speakers

Stereo Pair: https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/create-a-stereo-pair

Sub mini: https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/set-up-your-sonos-sub-mini

 

S

Sonos is very reconfigurable. If you don’t like the sound when you have the home theatre 5.1 setup, try setting your Ray to be in one “room” - maybe called Video, and the Eras as a stereo pair called Music. Try bonding the Sub Mini to one, then the other. Go with what you like best. 

Thank’s nik. Will try that and see if it performs better. I assume it’s not possible to get the system to run parallel setups if I prefer the stereo pair setup for music but would like all speakers to be active when watching movies? 

N
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Sonos is very reconfigurable. If you don’t like the sound when you have the home theatre 5.1 setup, try setting your Ray to be in one “room” - maybe called Video, and the Eras as a stereo pair called Music. Try bonding the Sub Mini to one, then the other. Go with what you like best. 

Thank’s nik. Will try that and see if it performs better. I assume it’s not possible to get the system to run parallel setups if I prefer the stereo pair setup for music but would like all speakers to be active when watching movies? 

You can “de-bond” the surrounds but to keep doing that and then re-bonding for movies can become quite tedious. 
When you have the 5.1 setup, you say you’ve got the surrounds set to Full? There is then a volume control for music - it’s more like a “bias” setting between front and rear speakers. 
If the Sub Mini is really not contributing significantly, I’d consider factory resetting it, then re-installing it to your system. A factory reset is not normally recommended but this time might be worth trying. 

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

The problem with Grouping two Rooms for TV viewing is that the Grouped room has a 75 ms delay that can be irritating and mirrors the front l/r channels, not surround channels.

For music there are no issues.

S

I’ve set it up as stereo pairs now. Sounds amazing. I’ll skip the surround sound mess altogether to keep it clean. The Ray is good enough for my TV needs even though it seem pretty stupid that Sonos doesn’t have support for different listening moods. I would have been as good off not buying a soundbar in the Sonos ecosystem.

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