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Audio Innovations Installer1
Contributor I
March 25, 2025
Answered

Pairing multiple Sonos Amps to an Arc Ultra for added surround coverage

I’ve got a client who would like to have rear surround and surround/height using 4 in ceiling speakers in his house with 2 AMP’s in conjunction with an Arc Ultra.  Is this possible or would it be better to just join the 4 speakers on one AMP to get the surround only? 

 

It would be great for Sonos to be able to do 7.x and Atmos systems using their existing lineup of products rather than being stuck in the 5.x/simulated surround realms.  It would open a lot of doors in mid/high end retrofit applications.

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jgatie
jgatieAnswer
March 25, 2025

No, you are limited to 1 Amp for surrounds.  As to using more than two speakers with a single Amp, I would not recommend it.  Surrounds are directional, and diffusing the directional cues to more than one point source will ruin the effect. 

As to allowing more wireless surrounds in the future, that’s a question of physics.  The current 30 ms buffer is right on the edge of where lip sync errors can be noticed, and how much bandwidth that small buffer can handle without causing reliability problems is very much a limit to how many channels Sonos can send out wirelessly. 

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jgatie
jgatieAnswer
March 25, 2025

No, you are limited to 1 Amp for surrounds.  As to using more than two speakers with a single Amp, I would not recommend it.  Surrounds are directional, and diffusing the directional cues to more than one point source will ruin the effect. 

As to allowing more wireless surrounds in the future, that’s a question of physics.  The current 30 ms buffer is right on the edge of where lip sync errors can be noticed, and how much bandwidth that small buffer can handle without causing reliability problems is very much a limit to how many channels Sonos can send out wirelessly. 

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