If the Amp is bonded to the Beam as surrounds, you cannot stream music only to the Amp. It has to be played through the Beam too.

Are any of your speakers wired to the router with an ethernet cable? Have you tried unplugging the Beam from power for a couple of minutes and rebooting your router?

If the Amp is bonded to the Beam as surrounds, you cannot stream music only to the Amp. It has to be played through the Beam too.

Problem #1 is completing this task (bonding the Amp to the Beam) successfully. We think we’re doing everything correctly in the Sonos App.  Tne room with the Beam 2 “sees” the Amp on our home WiFi network, we click the “+ Surround” link, and after 3 minutes or so of the progress bar pulsating, it says that it fails. The Beam 2 and Amp have one wall separating them, I’d say maybe 25 feet apart or so, but that shouldn’t matter, since they’re both using the home WiFi network that has adequate coverage. When we go back into the Sonos App, we see the speakers added as the surround. Yet no TV audio comes through them. Frustrating.

No. The indoor ceiling speakers are hard wired to the Sonos Amp. TV is connected to the Beam 2 via the HDMI Arc cable connection. The Sonos Amp is on our home WiFi network and operates without any issues under normal circumstances. We just setup the Beam 2 and did power it off and on a few times, and it even updated itself over the Web. The setup of the Beam 2 to our LG TV was very seamless! Amazing sound.

…

We’re disappointed since we purposesly paid more for the Sonos Beam 2, thinking it would seamlessly work with the Sonos Amp, as they were both…. Sonos products. Each of them work just fine, independent of each other. But we wanted more, specifically just this one thing more - the surround speakers.

When added as surround the Amp does not use your wifi directly, but only through the Beam to which it connects via a dedicated 5Ghz link. Could you try doing the  set up with Amp and Beam in the same room, just to see if the separating wall is the culprit for the failure to connect?

@cst6321 If you stream music from the Sonos app to the Beam, do you hear any audio from the in-ceiling speakers?

Is the dedicated 5Ghz link Bluetooth?

When in the Sonos App, when I click on the ‘room’ that the Beam Gen 2 is located in, it does “see” that I have a Sonos Amp in the same house - when I click on the “+ Surround” link. Isn’t that good enough? Why would it work 2 different ways? Makes no sense.

If I move the Beam 2 to where the Amp is, the Beam won’t be able to be connected to the LG TV. So, no, I can’t move them together. It’s one interior sheetrock wall diagonally across from where the Beam 2 sits, same floor of the house.

No. 

We did hear the music coming through the Beam Gen 2 itself.

When we deleted / removed the in-ceiling speakers from the “surround” setting for the Beam Gen 2 / TV, the “room” (containing the Amp) as defined in Sonos re-appeared in the Sonos App and we went back to being able to stream our music through the Sonos Amp and in-ceiling speakers as normal/originally.

@cst6321 So you where able to add the Amp as surrounds to the Beam - since they are i n the same “room” in Sonos. The 5Ghz link isn't bluetooth it is a direct wifi link form the Beam to the Amp to minimise delay to the rear speakers.

Could you set the rear speakers to "Full” in the Sonos app - this way stereo music from non-TV sources will play from both the Amp and the Beam. 

Yes. For whatever reason, today “+ Surround” worked. 

The only thing I believe was different, was my LG TV was powered off, and my mobile phone running the Sonos App was placed directly in the middle (distance-wise) between the Amp (behind the one wall) and the Beam 2. Clicked through all the prompts and it worked with almost no delay - heard the audible “chime” from the in-ceiling speakers when it was done, and that was that.

I increased the audio level for the TV surround to +15 (highest) and we can hear the surround audio when it’s there (e.g., crowd cheering on a sporting event broadcast).

Only difference from the music streaming service end of things is now the indoor music plays on the Beam2 and the in-ceiling speakers at the same time - so it’s a richer sound in the home.

Hi @cst6321 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I’m glad to hear you got your surround setup working!

The TV being off might have made sufficient difference to the amount of interference the Beam was receiving, but the location of the phone will have been irrelevant. It’s also possible that your router just decided to be more cooperative than previously.

I suspect, however, that whatever was causing the issue in the first place has not been addressed - likely, the distance between the Beam and Amp. 5GHz has a fundamentally lower range than 2.4GHz, and is also less able to penetrate walls and other objects.

If you have issues in the future (surround audio dropping out, or ??+?? showing instead of RL+RR in the System tab) then I recommend you either relocate the Amp so it is in the same room as the Beam, or connect both units to the router with ethernet cables.

Incidentally, I hope you have disconnected your outdoor speakers from the Amp, otherwise they will play the rear surround audio along with your indoor speakers.

I hope this helps.

Thank you for all the comments here.

We cannot relocate the Amp with the speakers still connected, since the speaker wires terminate in that other room I mentioned. 

For the outdoor speakers, we have a separate dedicated volume control dial for them in-house, and we’re turning that down (we understand the audio plays through all the Sonos connected speakers), until we purchase a 2nd Amp appliance (likely not Sonos - perhaps an Echo Link Amp - much cheaper) and connect the outdoor speakers to that appliance.