2 Sonos five stereo grouped with Beam for music

Question

Hi all,i have recently purchased 2 Sonos Five and stereo paired them to listen to music which works well. I am considering replacing my Bose aoundbar 500 with Sonos beam and my question is what is the best setup of the 3 pieces in the following 2 scenarios to get the most immersive sound experience? 1- Watching TV2- Listening to music  n.b: the music i am listening to is bass heavy.  appreciate your advice.

Ken_Griffiths · Accepted Answer

Thabks Ken for ur reply. May i ask you what is the difference between “bonded” and “group” in the context i described? Apologies as i am still not familiar with the Sonos lingo.

A brief summary...

A ‘bonded’ Sonos setup can perhaps be considered as a more-permanent connection between the Sonos devices. It sets all the devices involved to become one Sonos Room in the App - so you may just see all as “Living Room” for example.

The Main HT device communicates to its bonded surrounds mostly/usually over a 5Ghz connection (a wired connection can be used too of course) and it controls/passes the required audio channel to its connected players, which effectively just become dumb slaves to the main player in charge… I just try to think of them all as being one Sonos Room... a bit like your stereo ‘paired’ Sonos Fives are now.

Sonos ‘Rooms’ can be ‘grouped’ with other Sonos Rooms - this is a less permanent connection than those designated devices that ‘bond’ or ‘pair’ together - ‘usually’ the connection is made over a 2.4Ghz wireless band (and/or a wired connection) and is most often created by a user ‘on the fly’ in the Sonos App (System Tab),to play/stream music etc. in sync, across two or more rooms. One room is designated as the Group Controller, that’s usually the room you begin grouping from. It takes charge of the stream and keeping all in sync.

As a quick example, you could break apart your stereo paired Fives to become two separate Sonos rooms and ‘group’ them together to each play both music audio channels in sync, rather than stereo pairing them to each then play either the Left/Right channel audio.

Also for your information, when playing Music/TV audio to a ‘grouped’ room the audio is buffered causing an approx 75ms delay across the group to ensure the audio outputs in sync to all grouped players, but TV HT players do not have the delay (for just for TV audio), as the TV audio has to align with the video output on the TV screen (lip-sync).. but all will play in perfect sync for music audio.

So that’s the basics - I hope you are able to follow that brief explanation.

Ken_Griffiths · Answer

I optedfor the Sonos Arc instead of the Beam and I have two Fives (+Sub)‘bonded’ to itfor TV Home Theatre surround sound, which can obviously be done with the smaller Beam too. Such a setup sounds great for TVsurround sound.Also,and perhaps slightly more importantly,for music playback purposes, I am able to set the ‘bonded’ system to output music to all three playersin Full stereo - that means the Arc/Beam outputs stereo L/R channels and so do the two Fives. So it fills the entire room with perfectly synced sound.So that’s what I choose to do, but it is also possible, just to use the main device (Arc/Beam) on its own just for TV audio and have a separate Sonos Room for the stereo paired ‘Fives’ and simply ‘group’ them with the main device for stereo music playback too…some users do this, as they prefer to place the two Fives out front to broaden their soundstage,rather than have them set slightly behind them or to the side of their listening position. Obviously the type of setup is entirely upto yourself, but most options are catered for.Oh and just to say I think the Sub makes a big difference to the overall sound too, but that’s for consideration a little later, perhaps, but the Fives certainly do a good all round job in all areas of audio playback.Hope that assists.

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