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Two 5's and Playbar?

  • 16 December 2020
  • 2 replies
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Hi. I’ve been slowly expanding our Sonos setup. Next up is the main family room TV setup. Currently I have just the playbar there (original playbar). Works great for TV. I’m wanting to add a pair of fives for both music and TV. This will not be a 5.1 setup as I don’t plan on adding the sub and I want to place the 2 fives on either side of the TV on stands. My question is, will this setup work well for TV along with the Playbar? I know the fives will be great for music, but I’m hoping it will also enhance the TV sound as well.

Thanks so much for any thoughts and advice!

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Best answer by Ken_Griffiths 16 December 2020, 03:55

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2 replies

No I’m afraid it won’t if you choose to place the speakers out in front, on either side, as that’s not ideal for a ‘bonded’ HT surround sound setup - which ideally requires the speakers on either side of the seated position and slightly behind for TV surround audio.
 

For Dolby surround sound the Playbar plays all the front channels -  left/center/right - and then two speakers like Sonos One’s/Five’s etc; are used for rear left/right channels only.

They cannot be used for front left/right speakers in a TV setup.

 

So bonding those speakers is not going to work for front channels and whilst you can create a separate Sonos Room for the two Fives, as a stereo pair (as an example) and group that room with the Playbar for audio purposes - you will find that will only work well for music audio playback, but... (and this is important)… if you ‘group’ the rooms and play TV audio you will ‘very likely’ get an echo effect in the room, as there will be a 30-75ms audio (buffer) delay when playing to the Fives.

 

Note there are some ‘tools’ in the Sonos App to bring the TV audio back into sync (TV dialog sync) but you may then find you get lip-sync issues with the video on your TV screen.

 

The solution for all this is to ‘perhaps’ buy two sets of speakers - a pair of Sonos One SL’s would be ideal as rear TV HT surrounds and then get the two Fives (if you really want them out front) for your music listening, although you may find that music audio (when set to "Full” playback) sounds pretty good on a Sonos HT surround sound system.

Thank you Ken. That was very helpful!