What to buy with my VSX-820

  • 6 February 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 455 views

Hi all, I'm new to getting stereo/AV equipment and was looking into which Sonos products should fit my need before making the purchase and some advice on how to setup.

Currently I have a Pioneer VSX-820 receiver with surround sound speakers already hooked up to front, rear, and second room/outside channels. I'm looking to have the ability to stream music through the receiver while playing a separate input on the TV. Is it possible to do this with my receiver?

From what I understand, Sonos: Connect and/or Connect AMP should do the trick? Not sure what would best fit my needs. From this setup and my current receiver, do I also need the bridge?

Here's a rear pic of the receiver


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2 replies

Whether or not you can be playing 2 streams is a function of that receiver, not the Sonos ecosystem, so you'd need to check the manual to see if you can do both 5.1 from the TV and anything from another device at the same time.

However, the device you'd want from Sonos is a CONNECT, which would be connected to a tape in on the receiver. That way you could stream anything from the Sonos controller app directly to the receiver, and hence to any speakers you have connected to it.
Sorry, hit enter too quickly. The picture isn't quite large enough for me to see if there are tape inputs, although I think there are...but I think all those RCA jacks on the left are inputs.

The difference between a CONNECT and a CONNECT:AMP is the amplifier aspect, mostly. Since you've already got an amplifier pushing your speakers, it may not make sense to get another device that has the power necessary to drive more speakers. Unless you've got those speakers in another room, and nothing to connect the wires to so that they're powered with music :)

But if you don't already have some extra speakers beyond the 5.1 that you said are connected already, I'd recommend that you think about Sonos speakers, which would wirelessly connect to your wifi and the CONNECT that you'd have hooked up to the back of the receiver.

And no, you wouldn't necessarily need a BRIDGE or BOOST. Although I'm a fan of them. But if you can connect any Sonos device (CONNECT or speakers, in your case) to your router with an ethernet cable, they would act as a BOOST/BRIDGE and create the SonosNet parallel network that would take the load of streaming off of your wifi.