I have a home with 5 zones of wired speakers, each zone have a wall mounted volume control, all speaker wire goes back to the same location. I want to be able to stream music over all zones or some of the zones and would like to connect TV audio to one of the zones. Is this something that Sonos can do and if so what equipment do I need. The music stream would come from my ipad or phone. Thank you
new system
You could use Sonos equipment in that way without too much difficulty but the main selling point for Sonos is that they can do multi-room, multi-zone playback wirelessly. You can use Ikea (Symfonisk) products to add wall-mounted volume controls, but an essential feature of a Sonos setup is one or more tablet/phone based controllers (they only act as controllers - they do not act as the source for the music).
TBH, if you already have (or plan to have) all of the zones wired back to one central point, there are probably better (i.e. simpler) ways of doing it than with Sonos products.
All of the wiring and volume controls are in place. I have tried the Juke + but it does not have the power i want. Most of the multi zone systems are 50w per channel or less. From what I have read the Sonos Amp is for wired systems I just don’t know if its possible to tie multiple amps together to act as one system. Thank you
I just don’t know if its possible to tie multiple amps together to act as one system.
Yes, you can. You can name each Amp to correspond to the room that it serves, and you can group Amps in any way that you like (e.g. “Upstairs” for all Amps on an upper floor).
If you have existing volume controls (i.e. resistive controls) you may find those hard to integrate, though. It’s not really how Sonos have designed the system to work. Their core design involves one or more app-based controllers which are used to instruct the devices (the individual Amps) to change volume.
And to re-state what I said above: the Sonos app is not designed as a means to play back music on your phone. It’s important that you understand this.
Thank you Antifon, I could leave the volume controls turned all the way up and control the volume
via the app.. Would that work? When I said play back music from my phone I was trying to say
using apple airplay or similar music source.
Yes - it’s probably a more elegant way to do it. Rather than have wall-based controls, I have an Android-based tablet in a docking station in several rooms, and these run the (old, pre-update) app to control playback and volume.
TBH I’m not sure what you would wire the volume controls to, but perhaps you mean that they are resistive controls on the speaker outputs? I’m not sure how well that works - in general, volume controls should be applied at signal level, not at amplifier output level. Perhaps others here have more experience of this.
Has anyone out there used the Amps to create a multizone system with wired speakers? Thank you
An AMP has one set of speaker terminals and will support two pairs of 8-Ohm speakers. The in-wall controls can be configured to allow more than two pairs of speakers to be connected to AMP. This is how your present system is configured. In this arrangement all speakers will play the same music and each area’s Volume can be adjusted with the local control.
If you want to play different music in some or all of the areas, multiple AMP’s are required. If you have an area exclusively wired to one AMP, you can improve the sound by eliminating the local Volume control. Volume will be adjusted with a SONOS controller.
With respect to the TV, do you want surround sound?
Thank you Buzz, that makes sense. What I don’t understand is if you have multiple amps how do the work together? In other words if I have 5 amps for 5 different zones how do they play the same music?
Not sure I can have pure surround sound because of my speaker layout but definitely two front speakers with a subwoofer.
Thank you, so one could have an input signal from a cd player and that AMP would communicate that
input to the other AMP’s via WIFI?
Any Line-In can play in any combination of Rooms. A point of confusion is that a Line-In does not automatically play through the box hosting the input jacks. Line-In is simply a resource on the network.
Also, bear in mind that this would not be a fully functional multi-room system - because in that configuration the CD player is not within the control of the Sonos app. You could change volume in each of the rooms and group them in different ways, but you could not tell the CD player to stop, start, or skip forward/back a track via the app, for example.
In reality, Sonos has designed its system primarily for streaming services and, to a lesser extent now (it seems), serving content from a local networked media server.
It should function OK, but you will not get full control over Line-In devices via the Sonos app.
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