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Hi all,

I currently have a Playbase but I’m moving to a new property and would like to up my Sonos game!  I’m planning on buying two Beam’s (Gen 2) as TV speakers, and 2 One SLs

One SL will be in the kitchen and the other in a bedroom and I’m figuring I can move them into one of the TV rooms for enhanced viewing experience when required by creating a group?

My actual questions relates to a central ‘hub’ - what I’m wanting is a screen, on which I can watch, say, Netflix if I choose, in the kitchen (sound from the hub or One SL) or stream music via Spotify, sound from the One SL and/or Beam.
Does anyone have any experience with different hubs and pros/cons of what I’m hoping to do (or if it’s even feasible)?   I’ve been looking at the Nest Hub 2nd gen

Thanks in advance

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Best answer by GuitarSuperstar 6 May 2022, 06:04

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2 replies

Airgetlam

Is your ‘hub’ a non Sonos device, or do you mean that one of the Beams will be your central ‘hub’?

While speakers are easily moved, and easily grouped with each other, the Sonos system does have a delay of at least around 75 ms between a TV speaker and any grouped rooms. You could choose to ‘bond’ those extra speakers as surround speakers to the Beam, and they’d play surround information from 5.1 sources.

As you’ve probably noted, there’s a difference in Sonos parlance between ‘grouped’ rooms, and ‘bonded’ speakers. Worth doing some additional research and reading around the differences.

’Grouping’ rooms to play music in sync in all rooms is easily done, merely a few keystrokes. ‘Bonding’ a pair of speakers as surrounds is a bit more complex, but still should take less than a couple of minutes, but as it’s intended to be mostly a semi-permanent thing, it’s not something you’d likely want to do repeatedly. And surround speakers require a pair of the same type of speakers.

I think in general, your plan, assuming the Nest Hub is not a speaker, should work fine, if you can’t hear/see your TV set from the kitchen, and matches a setup I used to have, used mostly when football games were on, and I needed to be in the kitchen for cooking purposes.

However, I’d give serious thought as to whether you really wanted to ‘move’ speakers from one physical room to another. Sure, it can be done easily, but if you’re using the TV, and instead streaming music, it will be challenging. 

Bruce
G
Userlevel 7

The Nest Hub and Amazon Echo Show are both popular options. You just need to decide whether you want to use Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa as your voice assistant. When watching Netflix or any other videos on the hub, the audio will need to play out of the internal speakers of the hub since the One SLs and Beam are not Bluetooth compatible or have a line-in port. But you can easily play music from Spotify or any other streaming service on your Sonos speakers using either voice assistant.

If you want to enhance your listening experience on the Beam, you can add the two One SLs as surrounds to the Beam creating a 5.0 home theater setup. If you just group the One SLs with the Beam in the Sonos app, you won’t have a true 5.0 setup and you will experience a slight audio delay from the One SLs when playing TV audio.

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