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Hi,
 

I'm new to the Sonos home theatre but have long had some play 1s.
 

We recently installed the full surround set, moving an old play 1 away and having one of the surrounds in the same area.

 

We are a ‘switch everything off at the wall’ household. I had assumed that it would be possible to turn on one or both One SL and ask it to play music, without needing to turn on and use the full surround sound system. When I turn on a One SL in isolation it never shows up in the app.

Is there a way to make them behave standalone when turned on without the Arc? And when turning the Arc on, having them auto join the arc?
 

Thanks,
Jamie 

 

Hi.  In a word, no.  When configured as surrounds they are just satellite speakers that receive data from the Arc.  All of Sonos’ non-portable speakers are designed to be left on, and go into low power mode automatically when not playing audio.

Hi @jamiehc 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

What you describe happens by design - the surrounds are configured to completely depend on the Arc for their connection (they don’t connect to your router), and only ever really do what it tells them explicitly to do.

In order to use your Ones while the Arc is powered down, you would need to remove the surrounds from the Arc before you turn it off. When you turn your Arc on again and want to use surrounds, you would need to then add the surrounds to the Arc once more. Note that if you have them bonded as a stereo pair when the Arc is off, you would need to separate the pair before they will become available as speakers that can be added as surrounds.

Instead of all of this, we recommend you leave the Arc powered on - our Sonos Power Consumption While Idle help page shows just how little energy our products use when not in actual use. The Arc only uses 4.4 Watts when idle.

Alternatively, you could have an additional speaker to play music in that room and turn the SLs off along with the Arc.

I hope this helps.

Edit: And @John B beat me to it!

Hi @jamiehc 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

What you describe happens by design - the surrounds are configured to completely depend on the Arc for their connection (they don’t connect to your router), and only ever really do what it tells them explicitly to do.

In order to use your Ones while the Arc is powered down, you would need to remove the surrounds from the Arc before you turn it off. When you turn your Arc on again and want to use surrounds, you would need to then add the surrounds to the Arc once more. Note that if you have them bonded as a stereo pair when the Arc is off, you would need to separate the pair before they will become available as speakers that can be added as surrounds.

Instead of all of this, we recommend you leave the Arc powered on - our Sonos Power Consumption While Idle help page shows just how little energy our products use when not in actual use. The Arc only uses 4.4 Watts when idle.

Alternatively, you could have an additional speaker to play music in that room and turn the SLs off along with the Arc.

I hope this helps.

Edit: And @John B beat me to it!

Thanks for your reply. That all sounds terribly painful.

Unfortunately, if I leave the Arc on, it seems that no matter what I do with our TV’s audio system setting, it immediately switches back to the Arc from tv speaker. My wife prefers the Sony’s built in screen acoustic center speaker for regular broadcast tv as otherwise the arc throws the sound to the wrong place about a foot lower and too far forward than where the heads are.

That was going to be my next thread! I haven't yet tried tricking the arc into playing and pausing a music source to stop it from acting as the TV's sound, not sure if it'll work. 

Seems like a very useful feature for a surround to still be available when the arc is off, without all that faff!

 

 

 

The 'faff' is a workaround for the few users who don't want to use a Sonos HT system as it is designed to be used.

You probably also have 'TV Autoplay' enabled. Disable it.

Also, the Arc will play what it is sent. Whether it is sent audio to play is determined by the TV settings. There is nothing Sonos can do to control that.

Hi @jamiehc 

I confess I will never understand why people want to use TV speakers, but that’s your choice (or your wife’s). As most TVs will assume you want to use your Home Theatre audio, they switch over automatically. To prevent this, and thus use your TV speakers, just look for the option to turn off CEC in the TV’s settings. Depending on the brand of your TV, this might be called Anynet+ (Samsung), Bravia Sync (Sony), Simplink (LG) or something else - Google will let you know.

An option to perhaps improve the spatial audio of the Arc would be to Trueplay it, with the help of either an iPhone or an iPad. In the app (on an Apple device) go to Settings » System » Âroom with Arc] » Trueplay » Trueplay Tuning to start the process.

I haven't yet tried tricking the arc into playing and pausing a music source to stop it from acting as the TV's sound, not sure if it'll work. 

I don’t think it would - even if the Arc is not playing, the TV is still sending the audio to it so wouldn’t activate it’s own, internal speakers.

I hope this helps.

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