disabling Beam and only enable Five and Sub while playing music

Unfortunately, the Beam is the distributor in that setup and cannot be disabled as easily as the surrounds/Sub.  It’s important to understand what is at work here.  When adding surrounds/Subs, in order to maintain sync with the video, the radios are reconfigured to a low latency, one-way dedicated 5 GHz connection from the soundbar to the surrounds and Subs.  This requires a series of handshakes to get right, which is why adding surrounds/Subs takes a bit of time.  The reverse happens when the surrounds/Subs are removed.  So therefore, a quick toggle between the two is not possible.  They could place a hot button that does the add/remove at the touch of the button, but that is not going to speed up the actual process, and doesn’t save much from the system menu commands we have today.

An alternative would be allowing one to mute the front device and just play out of the surrounds, which would appear to be easier to do, but I defer to the actual engineers on the practicality of the idea, especially with regards to a spatial audio setup with Era 300s.   I’m sure switching from sending just surround info to sending a full Atmos audio stream through the Era 300 surrounds from the soundbar isn’t trivial, and given hardware limitations of the decoder and the way it is wired to the soundbar, may not even be possible.  I know you aren’t asking about this, but Sonos certainly needs to consider it when discussing this request.