We have a Sonos Amp in our home, with pairs of indoor and outdoor speakers (not Sonos Brand), hard wired to the Sonos Amp, and we have no major issues playing music through these speakers, via streaming services and the Sonos App on our phones.
For the context of this post, leave the outdoor speakers out of the conversation. This pertains to the in-ceiling speakers we have in our family room and wanting to set them up as surround speakers for our TV.
We also have a Sonos Beam Gen 2 connected to our living room TV. We want to connect the Beam2 to the Amp which has the hard wired speakers, to get surround sound. We can connect both separately and even play music from our phones through both the ceiling speakers and Beam at the same time. But TV sound only comes through the beam2, not at all through the ceiling speakers.
How do we connect the Beam2 to the Amp for surround sound?
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You need to ‘bond’ the Amp to the Beam as a surround device. Check in the Beam’s room for something like ‘add surrounds’, and it should take you through the process.
Important note, surrounds do not play the same thing as the front channels, ever, for the TV set. They’ll only play the surround data, never the right, center, or left data. You can, once they’re set up, change them in the settings from Ambient to Full for music playback, something I highly recommend, which changes them to full stereo speakers when playing music. It doesn’t affect the TV input, though. In that same area, you can set relative volumes between the ‘front’ and the surrounds, for both TV and for music.
When I click into amp and "set up surrounds" it says 2 compatible speakers are required to add surrounds. So, there is nothing to connect. I can however go into the Beam and set the AMP as surrounds. I get a success message when doing this. Now I can see both the Amp and the Beam in the same room. The Beam has LS+RS beside it. However, I can still not hear sound out of the ceiling speakers, just out of the Beam. I changed music playback to full like you suggested.
Any other suggestions?
It sounds like you’ve set up the Amp correctly, by adding it as surrounds.
What is your test? When you look at the Sonos app, what does it say the signal the Beam’s room is playing? The radio/wifi is turned on for both the Amp and Beam, correct?
I'm not sure what you mena by "what is your test?" Both Amp and Beam seem to be both connected to wifi.
What are you watching on the TV set to see if the surround speakers are working?
The Beam2 is connected to the TV. When I connected the Beam and the Amp that's what the app titled it. But I'm watching anything on the TV to see if sound will come out of the ceiling speakers which are the ones harder connected to the Amp. That's the problem. When I am using the TV and Beam2 no sound will come out of the ceiling speakers. But if I listen to music from my phone, I can get the ceiling speakers and Beam to work. It would be great to have surround sound for the tv.
I’ll ask again: what are you watching on the TV set to see if the surround speakers are working?
For the record, I answered. "Im watching anything". Meaning A movie, a show, I've tried different things.
I also should say now only sound even music from phone is coming out of Beam not ceiling speakers
“Anything” may or may not have surround information to get passed to the surrounds. Many of the TV shows in my location are stereo only (news, talk shows, older movies, etc). In order to test properly, you need to be watching a movie with surround sound encoded in the stream. I have long tended to use the opening beach scene of Saving Private Ryan, which does an excellent job with the sounds of bullets entering the water coming from the surround speakers. The Star Wars movies often open up with a ship coming from behind you, also emanating sound from the surround speakers, as it then moves overhead and in front of you.
As I said before, the surrounds will not duplicate the center ‘voice’ channel, ever. That isn’t what the surround channel is designed for.
There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.
When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.
