Question

How to connect home theater projector system to Play 5's and SUB?

  • 29 May 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 2456 views

So, I have now spent a great deal of time (and money) on setting up what I initially thought would be the ideal home theater entertainment system. I have several items of which I will list below but, now that I have given it further consideration, I'm unsure of how these devices will all connect to give me the experience I imagined, or if connecting them is even possible.

Devices:

Elite Screen Projector Screen
Epson Home Cinema 3700 Full HD 1080p 3LCD Projector
DirecTV box
Xbox One S
Apple TV
Fire Stick TV
Sonos Play:5 (1)
Sonos Play:5 (2)
Sonos SUB


It just dawned on me that my home theater projector doesn't have WiFi and, other than line-in, there is no other way to connect the speakers to an audio source, therefore, connecting it (projector) to my Sonos Play 5's and SUB does not seem practical.

I'd like to solicit ideas on how this setup can work. Hopefully it's something simple that I'm missing or unaware of that will solve this equation, or at least confirm that it's impossible so I can revise my setup in time to watch the NBA finals in my new home.

Mahalo

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1 reply

So, first thing you should be aware of is that you haven't purchased anything from Sonos that will process a surround signal. So, we can get those Play:5s (3 of them?) connected in some obtuse way, but you won't be getting anything like 5.1 out of them.

That being said, each of those 3 Play:5s does have a line input (headphone size in the back), so if you could get an output from the projector to that line in, you could potentially get the sound to the others at the same time, with the realization that you'd be incurring about a 70ms penalty as the speakers buffer the signal so that it can be played across all speakers without interruption. And no, you can't turn off that 70ms wait with the line in on those speakers. So lip-sync may be an issue for you (or it may not, different people have different tolerances)

You've got a lot of sources listed (DirecTV, Xbox One S, Apple TV, Fire Stick), but when I look at that projector, I only see 2 HDMI inputs. How are you connecting the rest of them?

If you've got a switch box somewhere that's taking all 4 inputs, and sending them to a projector as a single HDMI, you may be in luck, especially if that device has an optical output. If that's the case, then all you'd need to do is get a Playbar or Playbase, and connect it via that optical output, and it would be in sync, and interpreting a Dolby Digital (5.1) signal. You could then take two of those three Play:5s and hook them up as surround units, and you'd be good to go. You could then use that third Play:5 somewhere else, like in your bedroom, for music purposes.