Why dont the play 3 or the play 5 have optical inputs?

  • 29 January 2018
  • 1 reply
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It would be really great if the play 3 or a play 5 had a optical output so i could use it for my tv in my bedroom. Im not going to buy a playbar for a bedroom when they are 700 bucks. A smaller speaker for tv’s in bedrooms would be a great add to the sonos family

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There's two guesses I'd have. First would be a marketing choice, to encourage people who need an optical input to purchase either the PLAYBAR or PLAYBASE.

Second would be cost. There's probably a non-zero cost to adding that port to the device, and they didn't design them that way in the beginning. I suppose if they were to release newer versions of this, it would be a possibility, but since they just released the "new" PLAY:5 gen 2 last year, it wouldn't seem to be in their plans to undercut the sales of the PLAYBAR / PLAYBASE twins.

And I just thought of another possible reason. Since an optical input would imply the ability to decode Dolby Digital, there may not be enough processing power currently on the devices in order to deal with that. Sonos has not so far supported the concept of 5.1 for individual speakers, instead staying with the 3 front speakers in the PLAYBAR/PLAYBASE concept, and not allowing (for instance) 5 separate PLAY:1s with a SUB to function as a 5.1 system.