Living Room Setup Help!

Not the way you want. Sonos doesn't provide an opportunity to drive a 5.1 system, without using one of their soundbars.

You can use two Sonos Amps, to drive a 4.1 system of third party speakers, but the center channel speaker would be fallow, and instead Sonos gives a "phantom" experience by combining the right and left speakers.

The only way to get a true 5.1 system is to use a PLAYBAR, PLAYBASE, or Beam, all of which contain the front three speakers in the single enclosure.

I am not interested in having the Sonos run the surround part as the system in place works just fine.

What i I would like to do is have some of the speakers just be a speaker in the Sonos app so I can play music to it and not have to have an actual Sonos speaker in the room as I would prefer to use a speaker that already there in the ceiling.

OK, I apologize for not really understanding your initial post. But no, there's no real way of driving the "surround" speakers as both surrounds from your current device, and also drive them from a Sonos Amp.

Think of it this way. You've got a pair of speakers in your room. You want them connected to two different amplifiers. How would that work? I suppose you could purchase a physical switch to put in line to ensure that the speakers are only really connected to a single amplifier at a time, but it would be problematic.

If you're already driving the 5.1 system with another device, why not just hook a Sonos CONNECT to it, so that you can feed any Sonos stream directly to the other device, and use the current speakers? You'd get sound (stereo only), and could probably use the current device to determine what speakers are playing.

That sounds perfect.
so if I purchase a Connect that would allow me to have stereo sound through the Receiver that is doing the 5.1

if yes than I will pick one up tomorrow and try this out ASAP!

Yes, indeed, that is exactly what it is designed to do....feed the Sonos experience to an existing amp.

Perfect that is very helpful, and looking forward to trying. This out over the next couple days.

what other things will I need other than the So is Connect? Does it come with a connector cable or will I need to buy one of those?

Perfect that is very helpful, and looking forward to trying. This out over the next couple days.

what other things will I need other than the So is Connect? Does it come with a connector cable or will I need to buy one of those?

The Connect comes with an RCA stereo audio cable and a stereo mini (male) to RCA (male) Y audio cable. Your receiver's analog input will use the first one. If you wish to connect via the Connect's digital outputs (coax or optical), you would need one of those cables.

Note: Any digital cable will do, it is not necessary to spend big bucks on a digital cable. They either work, or they don't.