Sonos Roam as Surround Speakers

Since you saw other threads, I assume you saw Sonos reasons why the feature isn’t technically feasible.  Also, your examples are of speakers that detach from the sides of the soundbar, not completely separate speakers that you can use as separately controlled speakers whenever you wish. 

I completely see why this would be a desired feature, but I think the technical challenge of a speaker belonging to more than one Sonos room with the ability to switch in a timely manner, bluetooth capability, and handle trueplay tuning effectively is going to make this a rather expense feature to implement in an easy to use manner for customers that want to do this.  The cost may make it to where it makes more sense to use the ikea symfonisk speakers, and just leave them unplugged when you don’t want to use them.

I haven’t seen any official responses from Sonos. Only what seem to be to be assumptions of the reason from community members.

I completely see why this would be a desired feature, but I think the technical challenge of a speaker belonging to more than one Sonos room with the ability to switch in a timely manner, bluetooth capability, and handle trueplay tuning effectively is going to make this a rather expense feature to implement in an easy to use manner for customers that want to do this. 

Admittedly, I don’t know what the technical challenge is (or if there is one) as I haven’t seen a response from Sonos. At the moment, I’m assuming the reason it isn’t possible could either be technical or it could simply be a non-technical policy decision.

On the “ability to switch in a timely manner” - it would be great if there could be some kind kind of one button linking/unlinking feature. But I don’t think this is crucial at all. It currently only takes a minute to add surrounds, and only 2-3 more minutes if you want to trueplay tune (not everyone will bother).

You can turn off / toggle off the surrounds in the home theater settings.

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/4804?language=en_US

Here’s one. 

Sure, James did not say that it was not technically, possible, but I think the statement that the Roam can’t be surrounds because it was designed to be moved is a good indicator that Sonos sees portability and surround duty as incompatible features.

Also,  I think most people would find having to take several minutes to change your speaker from it’s own room to surround sound duty as not realistic to do on a regular basis.  Particularly if the lose trueplay tuning and don’t have an iphone handy to reset every time.

I’m wondering exactly what code would have to be written in to the Sonos system to support/deal with one or both surround speakers being “missing”. Right now, it’s just a error condition, but if this concept were supported, there’d likely be an expectation that something specific happens when there’s only one speaker as part of the surround pair, as well as a no speaker option.

And then the complaints about “this person took the portable speaker and didn’t return it to the surround system setup” part of that, too. For instance, your child decides they want a Roam to play on their picnic, while you want to watch a movie with surround sound….

I get the desire, for sure. It’s a Sonos speaker, why shouldn’t it be used for surround duty? But you could then argue the same thing about using their soundbars as surround speakers. Why not use a pair of Beams? 

Remember the rumor that the Ray could be used a surround speaker with up firing height speakers?

I do indeed….and I was hopeful, but it did make sense to me when they came out, and that feature was not available.  :)

True,   I didn’t quite understand how the speaker angles were going to work out.  And that rumor also didn’t include being able to easily switch from rear surround duty to soundbar duty in a different room.

Effectively removed ‘The Verge’ as a reliable source of information for me. Reinforced by their layout change, which is so jarring to me that I’ve stopped reading them. 

Apologies to OP for derailing the thread.  I’m convinced that the layout change was made extra busy to disguise the drop in actual useful content.  I like reading comments though, and other sites seem to have fewer, less thoughtful, or no comments at all.  And the authors often seem to just regurgitate what was in the press release.  Not sure what my replacement would be.