TV dialogue in back of large room

  • 29 October 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 71 views

Looking for advice on best Sonos setup to hear tv dialogue all the way in the back of our living room/kitchen “great” room.

 

see picture. Current setup is tv above fireplace with Sonos beam gen 2 below it. I want to easily hear tv dialogue while I’m doing the dishes or cooking (where the red x is) and the beam is 20+ ft away and underpowered for this. I know you can’t add front speakers to beam, so is there any way to hear dialogue decently from the back of the room? I tried to add One’s for surround sound but they typically don’t play dialogue in the rear channels. 
 

Thank you!
 

 


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3 replies

Sonos doesn’t make a good solution for this. You could set up a second ‘room’ in the Sonos software, and group the two rooms to get the ‘voices’ also coming from the second room, but there would be a minimum of a 75 Ms delay between the Beam and the second room. Not an issue at all if you can’t hear both at the same time, but you’ve got an open layout. I’ve used this solution extensively in the past, with speakers in my separate kitchen. As long as I didn’t stand in the doorway, where I could hear both, it was perfect. 

A possible work around:

If the ONE’s are being used as surround speakers, remove the ONE’s from the surround Room and “bond” them as a stereo pair. You could name them as Kitchen. Now you can “Group” the Kitchen with the TV Room. There will be a delay for the Kitchen. When in the kitchen, if the TV dialog is too far out of sync for your taste, go to Settings → System → TV Dialog Delay and adjust the Audio Delay. You may be able to find a setting that is acceptable to nearby and kitchen TV viewers.

Yes! Exactly what I was looking for. Delay is very slight and tolerable. Thank you both. Never would have figured that out myself.