If speakers are ‘bonded’ as either surround speakers or the Sub to the Arc, there are no ‘sync issues’, as they are all part of the same Sonos ‘room’. 

Any ‘room’ that you group with a Sonos Home Theater input (TV via HDMI) will have a 75ms delay between the Home Theater room and any/all grouped rooms…for the TV only. Any streamed data / music will have already paid that buffering tax, and play in sync across all rooms.

Thanks for the info. So that’s good for the Sub; it will be bonded and won’t have the delay.

Do you know if there’s any way to remove the delay for the other speakers that aren’t surround or sub? My use case for those is to get the TV sound closer. My family room & kitchen are connected, no wall between them, so from the kitchen you can see the TV, but with kitchen noises it’s difficult to hear it.

At that distance the delay may not be an issue, there would be a few ms delay just from the distance plus masking due to volume levels.

The delay’s an issue unfortunately. The minimum delay you can set in the app is 75ms, which is enough to make it sound like you’re hearing an echo from noise reflecting off a concrete wall.

The delay is how Sonos can achieve synchronised sound. When they first began, they had no tv speakers, so there was no reference point to show the delay, and that’s why the speaker combination you have works fine for music streaming. When they developed the Playbar they realised a shorter delay was needed to avoid lip-sync issues, so the soundbars have about a 30msec delay - but only to the speaker connected to the tv. So, when you group other speakers, they have the longer delay and the “echo” is the inevitable and unavoidable consequence. 

Yeah, that is what I expected. I just don’t understand how the surround/sub can stay in sync with the sound bar. I thought the delay was because of going through my wifi network. But if the sub/surround can stay in sync, that seems not to be the case.

Hi @Mochi1976, speakers bonded to the soundbar (surround, sub) do not use your Wi-Fi; they connect directly with the soundbar via a dedicated wireless link.

Ah, thank you, that’s the piece I was missing. This all makes sense now. I just wish the audio shop that I bought these from had understood that this setup wouldn’t work.

Best thing to do is simply buy another Era 100 and set them both up as surrounds. Then all will be in sync. (For music playback, in the Surround settings, you would select Full so the music plays in stereo across the soundbar and surrounds, as long as you have the left and right surround on the correct sides of the room).

And use the Roam elsewhere.

We’ve wondered about that. Right now I have too many speakers, since the Era in the kitchen doesn’t do what it was intended for. I’m nervous about the solution to too many speakers being to buy more speakers :)

And I’m not sure if I’d be able to make that work. With the Arc/Sub plus two Eras it will want to give me 5.1 sound. I’m skeptical that I would be able to get the system to give me 3.1 on Arc/Sub, and then downmix to mono on the Eras.

Maybe you can improve the situation by adjusting voice sync. It will be a trade off.

In addition to SONOS introduced latencies and voice sync fumbles by video sources, you have the physics of pokey sound propagation. Sound travels at about one foot per millisecond. If you have speaker and listener ‘A’ separated from ‘B’ by 30 feet, ‘A’ and ‘B’ will each claim the other is 30ms late, while listener ‘C’ standing at the midpoint will claim “equal’. All three listeners are correct. Reflections from walls, floors, and windows will arrive later — creating the “echoy gym” effect.