Sonos music system

Setup the Beam. It looks great and sits right under my TV as advertised (which is on a stand). Setup was not fun. It refused to connect, but finally rebooting the router solved it. Moved it to its final location and it wouldn’t connect again. This time my fault, the plug came loose while hooking up the HDMI.

Haven’t tried movies yet. Music sounds good, but the bass is a bit much. I need to find a setting. Wonder if I really do need the subwoofer?

And Airply 2 is awesome.

Edit: ok this is awesome. I can Airplay to the Beam, and then can group it with my older Play3 in a different room.

Got mine also, sounds fantastic, and the play:1s make great wireless surround speakers. Got rid of my gigantic harmon-kardon receiver, speaker stands, and speakers. I’m all about the minimalist aesthetic.

Only problem I had setting it up was getting HDMI-ARC to work. I had actually planned to just use optical audio since I’m changing the volume via a harmony hub anyway, but the beam came with this stupid optical male<->HDMI female adapter rather than an optical female<->HDMI male as one would reasonably expect, so rather than fishing another cable through the wall I just used HDMI.

I am having a heck of time getting mine set up. The Play1s wouldn’t set up and nothing would fix it. My Asus router is far too fancy, with far too many settings, and it’s becoming a constant headache (not just with Sonos). Read to turn of “airtime fairness”, and that seemed to work, but it still was rough going with multiple attempts and update failures.

Then Trueplay was failing, saying to remove my phone’s case. I did even though the case doesn’t touch the speaker holes. It stopped in the same spot, said to remove the case again, I answered it isn’t in a case and it passed. Seemed odd.

It’s working with music, although anything Amazon based doesn’t work, but I haven’t troubleshot that yet. My living room was 84 degrees and I got sick of messing with it. Will try a movie tomorrow too see if my surround sound works.

I think 90% of my troubles are my router. Guess I need to go find that router thread.

Avoid this thing:
Asus RT-AC5300 Wirel. Tri-band, RT-AC5300 NORDIC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019HH3HSI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_opStBbES1SEZ9

Considering that they’re wireless speakers, is latency ever a problem, especially for real-time activities like gaming?

No, they’re on your LAN. Roundtrip pingtimes should be in single-digit milliseconds. Compare that to pinging your game server, which is commonly anywhere from 20 to 120ms.

@LeeAbe: That’s a great router, should not need to replace it. You might need to turn on IGMP snooping or turn off Airtime Fairness. IGMP is because Sonos does weird broadcast network stuff to make everything automagically “just work” (except when it doesn’t) and airtime fairness is supposed to stop a single user from monopolizing your network, but you don’t need it in home-use scenarios, and Sonos doesn’t like it.

I have been tempted by the Beam, but I have a 65" Panny plasma mounted over my fireplace. The only thing that would work, outside of partial occlusion of the sound bar, would be something that hangs it off the bottom. I see a couple of different ways of doing this, anybody tried it yet?

I have had repeated problems getting things to connect with it. My Samsung TV, first gen Echo, Wemo stuff, and now this. Everything is usually fine once set up, but it’s a headache when I get something new. Thanks for the suggestion, I will try that.

Have had some time to play with it all now. Music, podcasts, and movies. No video games yet though.

Now that my router is settled, set up was really easy. Almost too easy. Pretty much plug it in and let the app do its thing. Through ARC, the TV and accessories just worked. No chosing playback settings and all the crap you do with a receiver. No extra remotes. No wires all over the place.

Music sounds great, although the speakers are a bit close together. Airplay is awesome for iPhone users. Podcasts obviously sound fine.

The surround sound is truely where it shines. I have had a surround sound receiver of some kind for well over a decade, but I never really went the extra step and really balanced it. The Sonos app took care of that and it really sounds great. And I am not sure I really need the subwoofer now. If I had a house sure, but the bass is pretty good on the Beam. It’s enough for my condo, that is for sure.

I was releuctant to spend the money on this, but so far no regrets. I am thrilled with it. Definitely something people should check out if they want to simplify their home theater system.

Neither Xbox Box One, nor Switch will do surround sound with the Beam/Play1s. Might be my TV, but really unsure. Apple TV required zero setup. With the Switch my TV (Samsung) wants to set it up as cable box, but the Xbox seems fine. Neither will play in surround.

It only works with dolby digital, which happens to be the most common surround sound format. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with DTS which is somewhat common, so your source will need to downconvert to dolby digital or PCM (stereo).

I agree the bass is great, it all sounds lovely.

Don’t see any options for the type of surround sound. On the Switch I go to audio settings and set it to surround, but only get 2 channels in the test. Set it to auto and get 5, but all through the Beam, not the back speakers.

Xbox won’t let me set it to anything besides stereo.

I must have something set up wrong, but no clue what. Been through all of my TV, Sonos, and console settings.

From a quick google, the switch outputs surround sound in PCM mode only, which your TV probably converts down to stereo. Looks like there is no solution to that. Nintendo didn’t want to pay Dolby licensing fees so it doesn’t support the format at all.

Again from my search, you should be able to set the Xbone to output in bitstream dolby digital format, which should work with the sonos.

Thanks, I did find that too on the Switch. Silly Nintendo.

XBox I didn’t t see that option. Will look again.