No Airplay 2 for Playbar. GUTTED !!!!!

One day I decided to toss out my 7.1 THX Ultra built with separate pre-amps and power amps because I got tired seing those big speakers, those garden hose size speaker wires on the floor, I was tired of my living room looking like a cinema like, an aggressive environment, and not an actual living room where it's easy to relax. I then decided to go with Sonos for the simplicity of their system, surely not for the sound quality. After 25 years playing with home-theaters I knew that sound wise the Sonos could not offer the quality that can be achieved with a traditional system. But I wanted simplicity and that's what I got with Sonos. And I'm happy with my Sonos! Of course when I'm watching a sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster I miss my old system.

But my audiophile / videophile friends were all against the idea of replacing a main system with a Sonos. They all ask me what are you going to do when the Sonos speakers can no more follow the Sonos application? I answered nah! no problem, the Sonos speakers are updated wirelessly via the app. And Sonos keep the same Playbar speaker for years now, they don't come up with a replacement model every six month, so they must keep their wining classic design and simply update the hardware to keep it up to date, because yes that's so easy to do now these days. I mean, which company would keep on advertising that they're at the leading edge of the multi-room wireless technologies and keep on selling the same speakers years after years at the same premium price tag and never update them right?

Boy i was so wrong! And my expert friends were so right. Sonos fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me.

@DavinciQC The hardware requirements for airplay 2 were not set a year ago. The original design was that each speaker would need to have a specific chip. That got discarded. As well, (and I could be wrong about this) there was a time when the designed was for the speakers to stream the audio themselves, without using an iphone/ipad/ATV as a go between. That decision, if it really was the case, would have had a big impact on hardware requirements. I believe hardware requirements were not set until this year. That included a lot of memory for buffering, much larger than one Sonos currently uses for buffering.

I also don't know that Sonos really could have upgraded the hardware in the playbar without creating a 2.0 or 1.1 version, particularly since it would result in different features for the product. Customers would probably still complain about that, and would created a lot of issues for support.

Since we know a Sonos One can be the group leader and stream to a Playbar, it follows that the Playbar 5.1 setup could also be programmed to proxy the Airplay protocol through to a linked/slaved Sonos One surround speaker. Available bandwidth and latency are unlikely to be problematic.

Heck I've done exactly that sort of thing in large distributed applications, conceptually it's "merely" offloading the processing to a more powerful neighbour.

However if I was a Sonos product manager I would probably not have this on my roadmap. Just because it's possible, and clever, and customer-friendly, doesn't mean it's worth the bother of going through all the engineering work, testing, and then handling all the support issues from weird edge cases.

Since we know a Sonos One can be the group leader and stream to a Playbar, it follows that the Playbar 5.1 setup could also be programmed to proxy the Airplay protocol through to a linked/slaved Sonos One surround speaker. Available bandwidth and latency are unlikely to be problematic.

Heck I've done exactly that sort of thing in large distributed applications, conceptually it's "merely" offloading the processing to a more powerful neighbour.

However if I was a Sonos product manager I would probably not have this on my roadmap. Just because it's possible, and clever, and customer-friendly, doesn't mean it's worth the bother of going through all the engineering work, testing, and then handling all the support issues from weird edge cases.

Are you suggesting that the Sonos One could perform this function on behalf of the playbar AND handle it's own tasks? I kind of doubt that was much of a possibility. If not, well, yes, that's pretty much what happens when you group the One with a playbar. You could even turn down the volume on the One if you don't want audio in that zone.

Are you suggesting that the Sonos One could perform this function on behalf of the playbar AND handle it's own tasks? I kind of doubt that was much of a possibility. If not, well, yes, that's pretty much what happens when you group the One with a playbar. You could even turn down the volume on the One if you don't want audio in that zone.

Wearing my tinkering engineer's hat I can say yes, I'd personally have put it on my things-to-try list. I'm presupposing that a One that's been linked to a Playbar in a 5.1 arrangement is not otherwise doing an awful lot with its CPU.

However, there's some potentially really hairy stuff at the boundary of the audio synchronisation mechanisms and Sonos's bespoke networking behaviours, which is exactly where a proxying mechanism would sit, so that's where the idea starts to look like a fun lab project but not necessarily product-worthy.

This is all speculation on my part but there are undoubtedly some bright sparks at Sonos whose minds it will almost certainly have crossed.

I get what you're saying, and I have no doubt that Sonos engineers tried this out. It's not hard to predict that customers would want their playbar with Ones as surrounds to be airplay compatible. I would guess that it didn't work.

It could so be that it breaks some fundamental walls of the framework they've setup. In that case, the playbar is sending audio to the very same speaker that it's receiving audio from. It also means that the One is both a slave, in the surround speaker sense, and a sort of master over the playbar when it comes to airplay. It's not elegant at all, which can often lead to things being not so stable and falling a part eventually. In other words, even if it worked, I personally would be hesitant to pull the trigger on that choice.

But yes, interesting to speculate on.

This is ridiculous! Just found out that my home theater setup wih a Playbar and 2 Sonos ONE as surrounds doesn’t work with AirPlay2!! Wtf? In order to get airplay2, i have to remove the sonos one from the setup.

It has been said in many locations that as long as there was a single AP2 speaker in a grouping you could control the whole group and now it seems we are finding out otherwise. My issue is I have a large room with wall mount only option so a playbase or Beam will not work for me in my 5.1 set up but I very much want AP2 controls in my 5.1 set up. So I guess I either have to down grade to a Beam or wait with hopes that Sonos releases a new full size playbar some time soon. Little frustrated since I have read countless places stating that the 5.1 systems would have AP2 control if you had Ones as surrounds

Since we know a Sonos One can be the group leader and stream to a Playbar, it follows that the Playbar 5.1 setup could also be programmed to proxy the Airplay protocol through to a linked/slaved Sonos One surround speaker. Available bandwidth and latency are unlikely to be problematic.

That would have been nice if possible. But like I already said in my earlier posts, Sonos is crystal clearly in their FAQ section that the mix Playbar and Sonos One or Play:5 (2nd gen) will NOT give access to Airplay 2. I don't think they would go as far as lying to us in their FAQ. So we can assume that sadly what you are suggesting is not possible. But they if you have the equipment already and have the time to try this out, be my guess, if you make it work you'll be our savior :-)


This is ridiculous! Just found out that my home theater setup wih a Playbar and 2 Sonos ONE as surrounds doesn’t work with AirPlay2!! Wtf? In order to get airplay2, i have to remove the sonos one from the setup.

I hear you, we are all very angry at Sonos right now. I have been thinking about buying a pair of Sonos One for a while now, and with their actual small discount when you buy a pair of Sonos One and my local store paying taxes until August, I really was gonna pull the trigger.

By the way, you have it the other way around, to have Airplay 2 you should not remove the Sonos One from your setup but rather your Playbar. Yeah it's that ridiculous.

It has been said in many locations that as long as there was a single AP2 speaker in a grouping you could control the whole group and now it seems we are finding out otherwise.

The statement actual is true. The issue problem is in your understanding what a group is within Sonos terms. Speakers in a 5.1 setup are not grouped together, they are bonded. A stereo pair is not a group either. A group is actually two separate rooms temporally set together to play audio in sync.

I get why people can interpret the statement differently, since the 'word' group is rather generic in the English language, not specific as it with Sonos. Hard to even really blame Sonos for this as tech companies used generic words for a more specific meaning all the time, to at least give users a clue about what they mean rather than inventing words.

By the way, you have it the other way around, to have Airplay 2 you should not remove the Sonos One from your setup but rather your Playbar. Yeah it's that ridiculous.

Within the Sonos app, you cannot remove the playbar from a 5.1 setup. You can remove the surrounds, which then put the surrounds as a separate stereo pair. Of course, you can also remove the sub, but that's irrelevant here.

I understand that your looking at it from a perspective that the playbar is sort of blocking the Sonos Ones airplay 2 functionality, and that's not inaccurate. However, that's not accurate in terms of what would need to be done within the control app.