how to make 5.0 setup play as stereo not surround sound?

  • 14 May 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 1200 views

Hi, I've always preferred having my rear speakers playing the same as the front speakers. This makes the sound fuller in my opinion, especially with vocals coming from all around you. I don't like how standard surround sound has no vocals at all coming from the rear. My last setup I put everything in stereo and this worked how I wanted it but I can see no way of making my Sonos speakers play in stereo.

I have read about trying to separate the playbar and rear speakers then joining them somehow but I'm worried if I do this I won't be able to control the volume of the rear speakers and it will be blasting out from behind me because you can only change room volume instead of individual speakers. Any help in figuring this out would be appreciated.

If it helps I also run my videos from my computer to TV using HDMI and from TV playbar using optical. If there is a way that I can force my computer to output in 2.0 stereo I would be more than happy to do it this way if anyone knows how, I've tried changing settings in my player settings but it still outputs in surround sound even when I set it to stereo 2.0

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2 replies

Userlevel 7
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You can't do what you want I'm afraid. If you remove the two rear Play speakers and set them up as a stereo pair you COULD group them to the Playbar and they would play stereo. BUT they would have a 70 ms delay compared to the layer so you would have a nasty echo. It would be horrible.
Thankyou, this is what I eventually ended up doing and i adjusted the lip sync setting on the playbar to match the timing of the rear speakers. This did mean that the audio and video were slightly out of sync but I managed to adjust that easily enough with the player itself.