Over the years, many owners have asked for a simple way to detach and reattach their surrounds speakers. So far, nothing is available and Sonos do not comment on future developments.
I have a large living room that has been setup with an Arc, a Sub3 & 2 x ERA 300s as rears. Awesome sound when watching Atmos movies and listening to Atmos Music, while seated in my TV chair, however, is there a way / suggested config that would enable me to play General Music / Atmos Music through just the 2 Era 300s and then switch back to adding them as rears to the Arc & Sub, when I watch movies? As a stand alone pair, (before I added them as Rears), the sound seems to be better for music (in General) than as part of my current Atmos Movie Setup.
Hope it makes sense what I’m asking?
I recently purchased Arc, Sub Mini & 2 Era 300s and have been experimenting with using them as stereo pair or surrounds. I agree would be great to be able to easily isolate them as required for music but that isn’t possible. I’m limited as to where I can locate my 300s but repositioned them yesterday and restored as surrounds and for music, whether Atmos or not, very happy with the sound. They are very powerful speakers.
This is such a basic and obvious requirement and my mind is blown after all this time & so many posts asking the same question it cannot easily be done.
It stops me buying more Sonos products, feeling like a few years ago with Apple when everything was locked down & they knew best what their customers wanted.
I don't know if you could setup surround with the official app and a stereo setup with a 3rd part app like sonopad or sonosequencer? as I said Im not buying the surrounds to find out.
This is such a basic and obvious requirement and my mind is blown after all this time & so many posts asking the same question it cannot easily be done.
That’s because it can’t easily be done. When adding surrounds/Subs, the radios are reconfigured to a one-way dedicated 5 GHz connection from the soundbar to the surrounds and Subs. This requires a series of handshakes to get right, which is why adding surrounds/Subs takes a bit of time. The reverse happens when the surrounds/Subs are removed. So therefore, a quick toggle between the two is not possible. They could place a hot button that does the add/remove at the touch of the button, but that is not going to speed up the actual process, and doesn’t save much from the system menu commands we have today.
An alternative would be allowing one to mute the front device and just play out of the surrounds, which would appear to be easier to do, but I defer to the actual engineers on the practicality of the idea, especially with regards to spatial audio through Era 300s. I’m sure switching from sending just surround info to sending a full Atmos audio stream through the Era 300 surrounds from the soundbar isn’t trivial, and given hardware limitations of the decoder and the way it is wired to the soundbar, may not even be possible.
