Welcome @jamcomp ,

Sorry for the delayed response, we can add this as a feature request should you wish that. But to give you a bit of technical background, when the speakers are paired with the Beam/ Playbar/ Playbase they are using 5.0Ghz wireless to connect directly to it in order to quickly receive TV audio in sync with the video.

However when you unpair them from the beam and simply group them via the "Group" function all the speakers will be communicating via 2.4Ghz wireless band to the router instead. This adds time for information to travel from speaker to speaker, so this is why it takes time to actually setup the speakers to work as surrounds for home theater setups. Since the connection is being established from speaker to speaker via 5.0Ghz. Regardless, we can put this down as feature request.

I'd like this feature as well. Have an Arc/sub gen2/two play ones all for 5.1/tv but at night want to separate the rears for playing white noise for sleep aid where they are at bedside. A quick detach without losing trueplay settings would be great. Thanks!

Hi @azdesert.

Welcome to the Sonos community and thanks for reaching out to us.

This feature request has already been sent to our engineering team to take a look at.  Just to set your expectation since our engineering team does not respond to any feature requests. We can subscribe to this thread and our announcement thread for any feature release and up-to-date announcements. 

Please let us know if you still have further questions or concerns. We are always here to help.,

Thanks,

I would like the same feature. Sometimes my kids are watching Tv in the living room with the Beam and I want to listen to music in the kitchen. I can’t if they’re paired in stereo. If they are, I have to listen so some princess movie in surround sound, which is terrible. Too many steps to pair and unpair, so I never use surround now. I purchased 2 ones for this purpose. 

I imagine it would be possible for Sonos to make things slightly easier, but I am not sure about quicker.  Even if it could be reduced to a toggle, it is not like just ungrouping.  The speakers connect in different ways in the two scenarios, and a reconfiguration has to be gone through.  In effect, all Sonos can do is automate the button presses and waits into a single press and one wait.  That isn’t a huge gain.  If you are looking for an instant result, I suspect that is technically impossible.

I imagine also that it would be possible to store Trueplay settings (although I don’t know that).  Now that memory is not quite so constrained under S2 maybe this will be revisited, but it may not be a top priority.

Personally, for these and other reasons, I will be surprised if we see this any time soon.

Yes! Honestly I was very surprised and disappointed that this cannot be achieved - so much that I’ve resorted to only pairing my surrounds before watching a movie, and unpairing afterwards, which is quite annoying.  
 

I purchased two one SLs over a month before getting an arc and sub since they were back ordered, with the ultimate intent to use as a surround set with flexible grouping. The sound from the Ones are incredible for their size and fill out our living room and kitchen well. I loved the ability to group/ungroup the two based on listening needs. Once paired as surrounds, the ones, which are closer to our kitchen have dull, quiet sound compared to what we previously experienced (which makes sense, given they’re set as surrounds as part of the system). Since the Ones are much closer to our kitchen and areas we spend much more time in if not watching TV, the distant sub and arc with closer surrounds provide a significantly diminished sound experience than we had previously with just the Ones by themselves. 
 

The ability to temporarily disassociate the Ones as surrounds without going through the setup process and pairing the combo of 4 units with independent volume control would be extremely useful. 

@mopacs  The speakers are not paired to the main HT speaker, they are bonded  Please read my previous post regarding why it is probably impossible to reduce the time required to unbond.

In the Playbar Surround Settings,  do you have music set to Ambient or Full? If Ambient then try Full.