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No Sonos yet, but soon. I have a large rectangular (not square) loft room. in one corner, there is a TV. in the other corner is the kitchen. all one open room.



I just pre-ordered a Sonos Beam and ordered one Sonos One. The Beam will go in front of the TV. Ideally, the One would go into the kitchen on the other end. I could purchase another One and place it in the middle of the room, if need be.



I would like to hear good TV sound with some surround sound when I sit down in front of the TV, and use the system for music (amazon music unlimited) when I am cooking. in this sense, the One ( + One ) should not always act as surround speakers, but there are cases where they should behave as such. the system could be smart and figure out what the speakers should be from the input source, or I could use voice commands.



how should this be done?



advice appreciated.
Bonding them as surrounds is a semi-permanent arrangement, is is not easy to unbond them for use as a separate room. However, you can set them to Full mode for music sources, which means they will play at full volume along with the Beam, instead of ambient volume like surrounds.
I'm not sure about the "figure out what the speakers should be", but keep in mind that you need 2 rear speakers, in your case 2 Sonos One's, to have surround. Software won't let you have just 1 surround speaker.
Sonos allows you to do as you wish. If you added two Sonos Ones as surrounds to the beam, they will act as surround sound for the tv, and full stereo speakers when playing from a different source, if you set it as up as such. That also means that you won't be able to play anything on your Sonos Ones and have the beam off. It will always play together.



Also, if you setup sonos ones as surrounds with a beam, the microphones on the sonos ones will automatically turn off. You'll just have the beam's microphone for voice control. So if you want to do this setup, I'd see if you can quickly cancel your pre-order and order the beam+ play 1 package instead...saving you around $150 (in the US anyway). If you can't cancel, you could just order the package and return your original order when it arrives.