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Hi all,

i’ve a surround system composed by 1 sonos arc + 2 sonos one sl as rear channesl. Sometimes i play music from youtube videos from my tv and i get worst experience compared to playing music directly from the app. I’m not talking about youtube lower audio quality but the “problem” is that audio is beign played by the tv and processed to play also on rear channels from a stereo pcm source (with sonos trying to figure out where sound should came from, for example voice on front and some background on rears). That result in audio getting a lot worse than playing music from sonos app and rear speaker set as “ambient”.

Is there a way to manually tell the system to threat audio from tv as per “music” source? If not i think that would be a nice addition to the system because it is possible to also reproduce music from the tv non only movies or tv programs.

I hope i’ve be clear enough.

Thank you.

No, this isn’t possible. Playing a YouTube video on your TV will always be detected as a TV source. And the quality of the up-mix is largely dependent on the quality of the audio on the YouTube video.

I understand exactly what you are describing and have been waiting for a feature to address this for years (since the Playbar was released). All it would take is adding a TV Music Mode type option in the app to treat the incoming audio from the TV in the same way as streaming audio. Instead of focusing on outputting audio from the front, it would blast it out all speakers.

I can only assume there has not been enough people requesting this and most are satisfied with the status quo. It is frustrating when a multi-thousand dollar system can't do something a budget brand can, but it is what it is.

As a workaround I use my Mac to watch music related videos/streams whilst streaming the audio over to Sonos - outputting through all speakers. Works great apart from the small screen compared to the TV. I would also love to to leverage the TV during parties to show what's playing with cover art etc, but can't as it sounds poor with everything coming from the front.

No, this isn’t possible. Playing a YouTube video on your TV will always be detected as a TV source. And the quality of the up-mix is largely dependent on the quality of the audio on the YouTube video.

It is not possible because Sonos hasn't made the possibility yet. Technically it should be easy I mean when I play Spotify through my phone then I get all surrounds on full volume and Spotify is just stereo. So all they gotta do is add a button with " TV music mode" and send that stereo to rear speakers, too. It wouldn't even be upmixing.  Really hope that we'll be able to do this soon. Currently the one SLs in my living room are only doing real work on movies (i dont even watch them too much) , but we do have parties every now and then when we blast that thing full volume and would love the extra rear sound. So i gotta say, they are useless most of the time. 

I’ve literally had this exact same problem. Was gutted got everything setup today and couldn’t use it exactly as I had wanted. The only solution I have found which is really long winded is to remove the Sonos ones as a surround sound. Then group the beam sub and ones together instead of setting up a home theatre. 
 

downside is you would need to control the volume through the app as only the beam/arc volume increases or decreases. 
 

hope this helps 🤷🏽‍♂️

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