The living room is not huge, so we think one good speaker in that room should suffice. We are far more concerned with FULL, QUALITY audio than we are with surround/theatre sound. When playing music (from any of our devices - turntable being the priority), we would like the ability to play the music through all our SONOS speakers; when watching TV, we would like to output only to the living room speaker. So far, we’ve been scratching our heads trying to find a simple SONOS solution (i.e. as few components as possible). Hoping the community can help us.
For the TV audio, you’ll want to use one of home theatre products, Beam, Arc, or Amp. All three will connect to your TV’s HDMI-ARC connection. Your firetv and blueray connect to the TV, TV connects to Sonos. You will have the ability to group that audio with your Sonos Ones if you wish, or not.
The turntable is a little different. You would need a Sonos with aux line in, a Port, Amp, or Five. Amp is the only device that has aux line in and HDMI-ARC. Whatever option you pick, you can share this audio with the other speakers in your system.
Just to add to Danny’s excellent post above, if you decide to group the other two rooms with the TV room, there will be a slight audio delay, only on the TV input, between the TV room and the other rooms. If you’re streaming music, they’ll all be in sync.
Also, be aware that Sonos doesn’t interpret DTS, so you’ll need to be sure that either your Blu-ray player can transcode to Dolby Digital, or you select the Dolby Digital soundtracks when playing discs. Much the same as any other device that connects to your TV, it must be in Dolby Digital only.
Thanks for your responses Danny, Bruce!
Had hoped some workaround existed to get away with just one device. It’s too bad the Five doesn’t have an HDMI input.
So let’s say we go with the Amp + Five setup. Audio inputs (Line-in and HDMI ARC) go to the Amp, and then the Five is connected (along with the additional Ones) via WiFi. Do you know anyone with a similar living room setup?
When watching media on the TV, is the audio synced with the visuals? We wonder about that since the audio has to run from the TV to the Amp (via HDMI ARC), and then from the Amp to the Five (via WiFi).
Thanks again!
- G+N
Millions of users, I’m sure there is many similar setups out there.
Due to the way the backbone of the Sonos software works, there will always be a minimum delay between a home theater ‘room’ and a grouped room, for input on the video line in. However, when using the other line in (analog), and streaming music through the controller, that ‘delay’ occurs at the point of the line in, so all ‘rooms’ would be in sync.
I used to group my kitchen with my TV when playing football games on the TV, since the kitchen was a separate room. As long as I didn’t stand in the doorway where I could hear both ‘rooms’ at the same time, the delay didn’t bother me. Since there was no delay for music, it was always fine for that.
Thanks Bruce! Will give it a try!
