Add 2 x Sonos Five to existing Beam/Play 1/Sub home cinema setup

Yes, you’d need to be connecting and disconnecting every time, which is entirely possible but an absolute PITA… 

If you have two Fives, arguably those would be fine on their own as your stereo music soundstage, leaving the Beam, Sub and Era 100s as they are for TV only. If you wanted a bit of extra bass, then it might be an idea to add a sub-mini to the stereo Fives as a dedicated music sub. 

So in effect you have two set-ups: the home cinema (Beam/sub/Era 100s) and for music the Fives/sub-mini.

I would certainly not want to be continually un-bonding the Sub from the Beam every time I wanted to play music…

(NOTE too that if you want a decent music soundstage, you could just replace the Beam with an Arc Ultra so you have the Arc Ultra/Sub/Era 100s, which would save any need for Fives [or sub-mini], and would enable spacial/Dolby Atmos music. Also the Sub gen 1 is likely to become obsolete before long, just to add, so a gen 3 onward might also be a good bet...)

Thanks for your reply Rhonny. I’ve ordered a pair of ERA 100s to replace my Play:1s which will be donated to my son. Decided against ERA 300s as, i read here or elsewhere, they might be overkill with the Beam.

Unf the Arc is slightly too wide for the mounting location which is a bit of a drag. 

I suppose i could go with the Fives plus mini Sub and group as a separate ‘location’ to play HiFi music, which then would be a relatively simple switch over in the app to isolate out the Beam, etc. home cinema configuration. 

You’d actually set up the Fives as a separate “room”, rather than having it associated as part of the existing home theatre room. So, there’s no reconfiguration to do; you simply select “Hifi” or whatever name you give to the room with the Fives (a room name is just a label to identify speaker sets, such as Kitchen, Den etc) and stream music to that room. 

I think that’s what I said nik9669a. 

You said “I assume this will work but then would i have to deselect the other speaker components (Beam and ERA 100s) manually each time i just want to play music, and similarly when operating as TV home cinema would i then need to revert to the Beam/Sub/ERA 100s each time?”

I wasn’t sure quite what you meant regarding deselecting and reverting, so was just trying to clarify the process. You know what they say about assuming 😜 And you did ask the question - “would I have to….” - which I answered. But good that you already knew what to do; sorry if I trod on your toes. 

No probs thnaks