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Until recently, I had a Playbase connected to my LG smart TV with an optical audio cord. Also connected were my Sub woofer and 2 Ones giving me surround sound for the TV that seemed to work very well. Inmy living room I also had an older Marantz receiver, 2 decent wired speakers, a CD player and a Turntable giving me a reasonable stereo system.

In my infinate wisdom, I purchased an Amp which was to replace the receiver. My hope was to connect everything together so that I could have my TV with surround sound or switch to my CD or Turntable or the Sonos app for stereo. I purchased Y RCA plugs so I could connect both the CD player and the Turntable to the AMP. Obviously only one at a time but I hoped to save pulling and inserting plugs all the time.  The TV is now hooked up to both the playbase (optical cord) and the AMP (ARC  HDMI). Nothing is working as it should and I’d like to start over. I’m also contemplating moving the Playbase to the Bedroom TV and using the wired speakers with the ones and the sub and the TV speakers for surround.

Guidance on what I’ve done wrong and how I should set all of this up would be greatly appreciated.

With respect to your Y-Cable arrangement, this is doomed. When a unit is OFF or silent, it will interfere with the other unit. You’ll still need to unplug the unused unit from the Y-Cable, but the Y-Cable might bring the connection into a more convenient location. You can purchase an inexpensive selector switch to choose one or the other unit.

With respect to surround systems, you can use SONOS powered speakers or 3rd party speakers and AMP for surrounds. It is not possible to use PLAYBASE and 3rd party speakers or SONOS speakers as additional front left and right speakers.


It’s probably going to help if you say in what way it doesn’t work, because in theory there are lots of ways in which it might not!

You don’t say what turntable you have, nor what type of phono preamp you are using, but generally it’s not a good idea to connect two sources to an Amp on a y-cable, because in effect what you are doing is feeding the output of one source into the output of the other (and the input of the Amp) at the same time. It might work, but the outcome is likely to be unpredictable and it’s certainly not recommended.

You don’t say if the Sonos app is recognising all of the Sonos devices correctly, but if they are all present but not working in some unspecified way, you can reset the app (Settings, App preferences, Reset App) and it will allow you to re-install the devices within the app.

If that guess is wrong and it is not working in some other way, it’s probably best to describe what is actually happening.