Connect Sub to Multiple Groups?


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In my living room I currently have a stereo pair of Play5 for music. I'd like to add a Beam just for the TV. I'm also considering adding a sub. Is there any way to have the sub work with both the Play5s and the Beam depending on which is active? I'm assuming the answer is no, but I thought it would be worth asking.

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I second the feature request. All concerns like which „room“ takes priority are easily solved in the user interface. Especially for today‘s open living concepts where a room is not one room, the current situation is limiting where it doesnt have to be.

 

While sharing the sub has priority, it should eventually extend to other components. I could leverage one of my Play:5 as additional rear center on the TV e.g. although its general use case is a Stereo Pair for Music for the overall bigger room.

Userlevel 2
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If you had a conventional, wired system where you had a 5.1 home theatre system with sub, and an additional pair of hifi speakers, the same situation would exist. The sub would be wired to one environment or the other - either the home theatre setup or the hifi One. To connect to the other speaker set you’d have to re-wire it.

Sonos speakers are wireless, and configurable, and can be grouped. But there are limitations. If you have a stereo pair, you can’t suddenly decide you want just the “left” speaker running in tandem with a speaker in a different room.

I would speculate this this is analogous to why you can’t suddenly decide to run the Sonos sub with different speakers to the ones you initially bond it to, without first breaking that bond.

Yes, it would be a nice to have feature but I don’t see it happening.


This doesn’t seem like a good argument. Isn’t the point of a “smart speaker” that it can do things a regular speaker can’t…

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Hey there, amfnyc. If you have two separate zones (TV - Beam & Living Room - 2x Play:5) your assumption would be correct. There can only be one device that has control over the Sub. A few users in the past have requested "scenes" in Sonos that would act as configuration presets. If you'd like, I'd be happy to add your name to the list for this feature request.

Please add me too!

I would vote for this feature too. Can Sonos look into this matter please? The time seems right  with the new app coming out soon. 

Add me as one more vote for that feature as well.

Add me as one more vote for that feature as well.

I would like to express interest in this feature as well.  Would really add value to the Sub.

Userlevel 5
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Me too, please. I would like to use the same Sub on my Arc based Home Cinema setup and with a pair of Fives for listening to music. 

+1 for this feature. Open plan kitchen so being able to use the sub with the tv and playbar and for it to then autoswitch to the stereo Play3s when listening to music seems like an obvious feature to enhance the user experience. Look forward to seeing this in a future release. 

Hey there, amfnyc. If you have two separate zones (TV - Beam & Living Room - 2x Play:5) your assumption would be correct. There can only be one device that has control over the Sub. A few users in the past have requested "scenes" in Sonos that would act as configuration presets. If you'd like, I'd be happy to add your name to the list for this feature request.

Please add me too!

I vote for this feature as well. I have two play 5s In the great room for music and and when I received my new Sub (GEN 3) before the arc I paired it with them. The sound was awesome. When the Arc arrived and I set it up for home theatre it wanted to sub to be paired to the Arc. A little disappointed when I wanted to listen to music on Saturday morning and the sub was absent.  Smart devices should be more flexible. The sub should sit on the system and you choose it for your playing environment. I think this should be easy, even if it means adding a boost!!  Come on Sonos this is a great idea!

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+1 for this feature request.

With an open floor plan, my home thertre with arc, play 1 surrounds + sub, and my dining room with my play 5, the sub is pretty much exactly same inbetween the two set-ups. Would love to just use my play 5 w. sub vs having to activate the entire group to utilize the sub. 

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Another vote here for this function. I have a stereo pair of Play5s in the lounge and an Arc/Rears/Sub set up in the same room For TV. It would be great to have the Sub work with both more easily that at present. 

Surely it would be possible to just switch the sub between the two sets with a toggle rather than having to go through all the rigmarole of moving between the “rooms”

Of course if Sonos want to make me REALLY happy then let me also use the 5s as the left and right in the TV setup, with the Arc doing the centre and Atmos. :grinning:

This is f**king rediculous that we’re waiting for some simple software feature like dual group speaker pairing. Sonos get your s**t togerther. The fact that I must constantly re-pair a sub so that I can have 2 different speaker configurations in my main listening area is absurd. 

You make good speakers, but your software team sucks. The resent abysmal rollout of the S2 software update, and simple software edits to offer features like room setups is laughable. I can accomplish this with phillips HUE lights, and the fact that it takes your cracked staff over a year to get the memo is very disappointing. 

So it appears that I owe Sonos an apology. On Sonos controller version 12.0.6, If you select the room that the sub is currently assigned to in settings, and select ‘remove sub’ you can immediately assign the hub to a new speaker group (room) without re-pairing. This accomplishes, at least for me, what I need the system to do and quickly group the sub with the supporting speaker groups based on music or multimedia playback.

Userlevel 2
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So it appears that I owe Sonos an apology. On Sonos controller version 12.0.6, If you select the room that the sub is currently assigned to in settings, and select ‘remove sub’ you can immediately assign the hub to a new speaker group (room) without re-pairing. This accomplishes, at least for me, what I need the system to do and quickly group the sub with the supporting speaker groups based on music or multimedia playback.

Can’t wait to try this later. Major change if it works as simply as this

Userlevel 5
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So it appears that I owe Sonos an apology. On Sonos controller version 12.0.6, If you select the room that the sub is currently assigned to in settings, and select ‘remove sub’ you can immediately assign the hub to a new speaker group (room) without re-pairing. This accomplishes, at least for me, what I need the system to do and quickly group the sub with the supporting speaker groups based on music or multimedia playback.

Can’t wait to try this later. Major change if it works as simply as this

Just wonder if we have to retune the room after every re-pairing?

Userlevel 2
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So it appears that I owe Sonos an apology. On Sonos controller version 12.0.6, If you select the room that the sub is currently assigned to in settings, and select ‘remove sub’ you can immediately assign the hub to a new speaker group (room) without re-pairing. This accomplishes, at least for me, what I need the system to do and quickly group the sub with the supporting speaker groups based on music or multimedia playback.

Can’t wait to try this later. Major change if it works as simply as this

Just wonder if we have to retune the room after every re-pairing?

I had a look at this (but didn't actually do it yet) and it says it will remove the tuning when you remove the sub from one room. The question is whether or not you can then just turn that back on when you add the sub back, or if it will require a new Trueplay tuning. Will experiment once as I want to re-tune the Arc /sub/rears set up anyway. 

So it appears that I owe Sonos an apology. On Sonos controller version 12.0.6, If you select the room that the sub is currently assigned to in settings, and select ‘remove sub’ you can immediately assign the hub to a new speaker group (room) without re-pairing. This accomplishes, at least for me, what I need the system to do and quickly group the sub with the supporting speaker groups based on music or multimedia playback.

Can’t wait to try this later. Major change if it works as simply as this

Just wonder if we have to retune the room after every re-pairing?

I had a look at this (but didn't actually do it yet) and it says it will remove the tuning when you remove the sub from one room. The question is whether or not you can then just turn that back on when you add the sub back, or if it will require a new Trueplay tuning. Will experiment once as I want to re-tune the Arc /sub/rears set up anyway. 

 The rooms/speakers don’t store previous ‘tunes’.  There is nothing to restore, when you add speakers back.  I doubt the speaker even knows that the recently added rear speakers or sub were previously part of the room.  It certainly doesn’t know that you’ve placed the speakers in the exact same position they were previously.

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But you can turn trueplay on and off for a room without having to re-tune, so this suggests that it does remember?

Obviously this might be different if you take one part of the speaker grouping out?

But you can turn trueplay on and off for a room without having to re-tune, so this suggests that it does remember?

Obviously this might be different if you take one part of the speaker grouping out?

 

Wasn’t aware of that, but I wouldn’t qualify that feature as remembering a previous tune.  It’s storing the current tune, which is no longer valid when you remove or add a speaker to the room.  I understand that removing and adding a speaker without physically moving the speaker essentially makes the tune still valid, but this isn’t something that Sonos supports.

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But you can turn trueplay on and off for a room without having to re-tune, so this suggests that it does remember?

Obviously this might be different if you take one part of the speaker grouping out?

 

Wasn’t aware of that, but I wouldn’t qualify that feature as remembering a previous tune.  It’s storing the current tune, which is no longer valid when you remove or add a speaker to the room.  I understand that removing and adding a speaker without physically moving the speaker essentially makes the tune still valid, but this isn’t something that Sonos supports.

So I just followed this through and switching the sub to the other room (my stereo pair of 5’s) is really easy but, as suspected, you need to re-tune each time you move it. You can skip that, of course, so if you don’t use Trueplay this would work a treat, but Trueplay makes such a difference for the TV group that I couldn’t leave it undone.

Still frustrating, therefore, especially so as the 5’s / Sub combo sounds fantastic. 

(PS - I wonder if you turned Trueplay OFF on the TV group before switching the Sub, if it would still be available to turn back on when you put the Sub back? No speakers are physically being moved in this scenario, so the tuning would still be valid?)

No. The process of removing or adding a speaker erases any stored TruePlay and resets the ‘rooms’. 

Userlevel 5
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Then it’s no use for me… Thanks!

Please add me to the list - I would also like to switch my sub between the Play 5 pair for audio & Beam for TV.

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Add my vote too. I would have bought two fives had this worked. (I have an Arc and a sub, would like a Hi-Fi group as well...)

Come on, Sonia!

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