ERA 300 as surrounds missing front firing driver

50/50. My house is an open concept with only one system in my TV room. Arc, 2 subs, 2 ones. When not watching TV I like to tell Alexa to play music which I can hear all over the house. 

When I changed the ones out for the 300s, the system sounded cheap during music, but great during Atmos. So then I paired the 300s with one of my subs, and the center driver made a world of difference in the sound.  I literally spent all day switching arrangements and doing trueplay lol 

Anyway imo there should be an option to have the center driver playing during music…

Perhaps feed your request through to Sonos, or at least speak with them and see if they may have this idea in the pipeline already. If you do decide to do that, in addition to returning your speakers, then you can contact them here:

https://support.sonos.com/s/contact

Perhaps mention you wanted to add two subs to a stereo pair of Era-300s too.

I don’t have any hope that Sonos will enable the front firing speakers for stereo sound when it is used in a 5.1 or 5.2 home theater setting. There were so many requests in this regards anlready when the Era 300 came out and nothing has changed. It is really frustrating with Sonos. They encourage you to provide a request but nothing happens. I send them already so many requests which should be a no brainer to do and quickly to realize and they would improve the user experience a lot, but nothing changed. I tried to contact the CEO, talking to customer support, wrote a ticket and communicate here. Nothing of it has been realized so far.

Thanks so much for this thread you have all helped me save a lot of money, I won’t be purchasing these speakers whilst this issue continues.  I will also say that whilst I love the sound of my sonos system I have found that Sonos has a huge issue when it comes to understanding their customers and their customers experience across the board from their app to how these speakers connect from the very first time you buy your first Sonos speaker. Definitely not a system for people who don’t understand networking. You probably need to bring in a new team to help you rethink your customer user experience strategy as what you are doing and what you have been doing isn’t working well for you in my opinion. I wish you all the best Sonos. 

I agree with you Michael. Sonos is not what it used to be and stand for in the past. The hardware is great, but the user friendliness of the app, the quality of the app, mesh network quality when multiple rooms are involved and the reaction time to customers requests is getting worse and worse.

An option to turn the front speaker on in the settings on/off would solve the issue. Same when it is stereo content it would make sense to turn the front firing speaker on automatically.

I used to be a Sonos advocate but can’t say I am that anymore and would not invest the same anymore into Sonos.

I agree ..if users prefer to have also front speaker with era 300 should be possible to enable it when configured as surround ..but now Sonos have a very bad new app so I think are concentrated to solve lots of issue.. Sonos is not anymore what was at the beginning ..I paid lots of money for the set up and I have lots of issue and every request o saw from other users or feature needed never arrived .so...I'm thinking to sell all 

I just bought Era 300’s, arch and Gen 3 sub. Saw the Arch Ultra and Gen 4 sub were coming out so just preordered those.

now that I have my setup playing and not having the option for front drivers on my Era 300’s I’m returning my entire setup and canceling my preorder.

Great job Sonos you just lost $5,000 for not listening to your client base

Not everything the client base wants is good for them. Sonos deemed the front speakers too overbearing in this use case. I tend to believe them, though Sonos might explain it better.

Perhaps they need to communicate this better then as most people seem to be finding out after the purchase 

If you read about Sonos’ product development cycle you’ll see they spend a lot of time (and money) ensuring the amplification circuitry, speaker drivers and enclosure work together. They have a listening panel who vet and tune the products. 
 

I would assume this panel are the ones that decided the front-firing speakers “spoiled” the sound when configured as surrounds. 
 

Since we’ve all bought Sonos products because we like the sounds they produce, isn’t there a risk that this reputation would be spoilt if the sound didn’t always met their standards?