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Review: Sonos AMP and In-Ceilings for surround

 

As some of you may have seen from my posts during the last year, I have been building a new house. 
 

We recently moved in and I finally got to hook up my new home-theater setup:

2x Sonos Amps

4x B&O Celestial BOC86

1x Sonos Sub 1st. gen

65” LG GX Oled

 

Background 

I have been using Sonos for more than 10 years now. Except for the Sonos Arc, I have owned all of the previous home theater speakers, including the Playbar, Playbase and the Beam. 
 

My previous setup was a Playbar combined with 2 Play:3s as surrounds and a Sonos Sub. 
 

In our new house, we wanted to do all in-ceiling to create a lightweight feel in our living room, which is also why we decided on the ultra slim and no-gap wall mounted LG GX. 
 

I considered many different options, before finally deciding on the Amp to drive the setup. 
 

My concerns were:

 

Limited codec support (no DTS, no Atmos, no DD Plus)

No HDMI in/out, meaning that I would have to wire 1 HDMI cable from the tv to the Amps for audio and at least 1 more HDMI cable from the tv to connect video sources. The Amps and video sources are located in a separate AV-room, so that was a real concern. 
 

However, I only wanted four speakers. So the two Amps were basically perfect for that, enabling me to do 5.1 surround with a phantom center. I also still had some other Sonos speakers and wanted to stay within the ecosystem.

 

Furthermore, Airplay, Spotify Connect, Google/Alexa support and auto-detecting line-in means that they are pretty much as future proof as you can get these days. 
 

Finally, I needed power. The four speakers I picked out are high-end 8 inch, 3 way speakers from B&O and the recommendation was that I needed at least 100-125W at 8 ohm for each set of 2 speakers. The Sonos Amp delivers.  
 

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Over the coming days, I will be updating this post with my experience and testing. Please feel free to raise questions in the thread and I will try to test what I can. 
 

For now, I can say that;

 

It sounds fantastic and much better than anything I have had before. For music and movies. It is a huge improvement over the Playbar/Play:3/Sub combo I had before. No real comparison. 
 

Everything works with the tv and running in Dolby Digital 5.1. Everything is in perfect sync, the phantom center works great and dialogue is crystal clear. 
 

I have no issue with sound coming from above. The speakers have pivoting tweeters and mids which are angled at our listening position and we have a decent space in front of the couch up to the tv where the fronts are located. It just feels as if the sound is coming from the screen and not from above.  

I get the impression that home theatre is a distant second priority for this space.   The seating area is not directed at the TV, is rather distant from the TV, and the windows are sure to impact to viewing experience.  Nothing wrong with that, but given what you wanted to do with this space, I would definitely  agree that 2 amps was a better way to go than using a sound bar.  Makes perfect sense that the front ceiling speakers wouldn’t be an issue since there is significant distant between the speaker and seating area.  Glad this is working out for you.

 

To be clear,  I’m also using amps with TVs where the primary purpose isn’t home theatre.  Namely, outdoors.  I even have a setup where the front speakers are behind the view rather than coming from the TV.  Not ideal, but better for keeping audio in my yard rather than the neighbors yard.

I get the impression that home theatre is a distant second priority for this space.   The seating area is not directed at the TV, is rather distant from the TV, and the windows are sure to impact to viewing experience.  Nothing wrong with that, but given what you wanted to do with this space, I would definitely  agree that 2 amps was a better way to go than using a sound bar.  Makes perfect sense that the front ceiling speakers wouldn’t be an issue since there is significant distant between the speaker and seating area.  Glad this is working out for you.

 

To be clear,  I’m also using amps with TVs where the primary purpose isn’t home theatre.  Namely, outdoors.  I even have a setup where the front speakers are behind the view rather than coming from the TV.  Not ideal, but better for keeping audio in my yard rather than the neighbors yard.

You are not completely wrong. We are definitely mostly casual viewers and use our system more for music than big movies. 
 

However, I just added a picture to show that it is actually not as bad as it seems:

 

We have blackouts for all the windows. 
 

The image is stretched a bit to get all speakers in one frame. We are a bit closer to the tv in reality. 
 

The couch is pretty big. There is actually a full 3-seater directed at the tv. 

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