TV surround and Airplay 2

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I’m finalising plans to replace my hifi with a Sonos Beam and Sonos One SL set up. I’ve read that combining these components as a 5.1 set up (bonding the speakers) means the Sonos Ones would not be accessible for Airplay if I just want to play music. My questions are:-

In a TV surround setup with these components, if I Airplay music to the Beam (i.e., TV switched off), will it incorporate the Sonos Ones in playback?

Given that surround uses the Sonos Ones in a different mode to achieve true surround, will this be detrimental to playback of music outside of TV use?

Thanks for any advice.

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J

John BAnswer

Hi. The echo effect you talk about has nothing to do with different WiFi bands and is entirely avoidable. Let’s ignore that.

Your concerns are unfounded. The surround sound only applies to sound sent to the Beam over the HDMI cabled connection from the television. All music sources sent to the Beam (streaming services, music Airplayed from your phone etc) will play in stereo. As others have said, it will play in stereo from the Beam AND from the rears. You can choose whether to play the rears barely audibly (“Ambient”) or at a volume consistent with the Beam volume (“Full”). Surround sound does not operate in this situation.

In effect, there are two “modes” - TV and music - although they are not referred to as “modes” in the system.

(To complete the picture, the sound from the TV will often be stereo only, in which case you will generally get stereo from the Beam and nothing from the rears. What I have referred to as ‘music’ mode is really ‘not over the audio cable from the TV’ mode.)

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V

VultureSongAuthor

Avid Contributor II

That solution certainly addresses the dilemma by separating TV from the mix and prioritising music playback. The versatility of any Sonos system means that option remains open to me. I think I’ve taken the blinkered view that if all the (Sonos) components are available, then it makes sense to use them all, whether listening to music or viewing TV. It’s a nice problem to have. I’ve marched up and down this particular hill a few times and it’s time now to make a decision. I suspect I’ll never be entirely happy giving up traditional hifi but since I hardly use it these days, the argument to keep it weakens daily.

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