Question

3 (or more) Play:1 in one room without stereo pairing

  • 6 April 2017
  • 8 replies
  • 19056 views

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Hi,

I have 14 Play:1 hanging in a large room. Right now they all are in their own "Room" and then I have put all rooms in one group.

But I would really like to have another setup:
One room with 3 speakers
One room with 5 speakers
Three rooms with 2 speakers

And then group all 5 rooms.

The three rooms with 2 speakers would normally not be a problem, but when I put 2 speakers in one room they are getting stereo paired and I don't want them to be paired because they are not hanging so it makes sense to make them stereo paired.

I haven't tried to put a third speaker in a room because of the stereo pairing, so I don't know what happens when I do that.

Can I make the five rooms with out stereo pairing the speakers?

Thanks in advance

Jost

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8 replies

Userlevel 7
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No you cannot.

A room can only be 1 speaker, 1 speaker + Sub, 2 speaker (SAME) paired in stereo or 2 speaker (SAME) paired in stereo + Sub. (Or for completeness Playbar, Playbar + Sub, Playbar + Surrounds (SAME) or Playbar + Sub + Surrounds, Connect or Connect:Amp).

Sonos is really designed around he domestic environment where people generally won't need 14 units in 1 room!
Sonos is really designed around he domestic environment where people generally won't need 14 units in 1 room!
True.... although as the OP has demonstrated, it does do 14 units in one physical room, just not quite in the configuration the OP would like.
Userlevel 7
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Quite impressive really. I don't know far out the audio would need to be before you wanted to smash them off the wall!
Why not just keep them named as separate rooms, and just use the grouping function? There's no requirement to stereo pair them at that point, and you can have as many speakers as you want physically in the room, they just have different names. As has been pointed out before, the name of the speaker can be absolutely (well, I haven't tried curse words yet....) anything. Sure, it would be slightly more complex when you do the grouping process, but how often would you be doing that?

And if the naming gets a little wonky for you, you could name the speaker's "rooms" with a number appended. So you've got that one room with 5 speakers, and the speakers (not paired) names are "Living Room 1, Living Room 2, etc. Then it would be more clear that all speakers with "Living Room", no matter what the extra number was, were in the Living Room.
Why not just keep them named as separate rooms, and just use the grouping function?

That was my reaction when I read the opening post; and that the OP was perhaps overthinking the problem.
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Hi and thanks for the answers,

My current setup is exactly like Airgetlam suggest.

I have named all rooms so they makes sense according where they are hanging.
And then I have used the group function to group all 14 rooms, so I can control all 14 speakers.

The reason why I want to do the other setup is, that the 14 speakers is really not in the same room. I have two rooms with a door between them and the main room (the rooms with 2 speakers). And the 3 speakers I wanted in one room are in an area where it make sense to put them in one group.
I've attached a picture with the setup. It differs from my original post though. The current setup is
One room with 3 speakers (A)
One room with 7 speakers (B)
Two rooms with 2 speakers (C and D)



Sometimes I would like to play different music in those rooms (but as a general rule all 14 speakers are playing the same music) or just adjust the volume in each room.

Yes, I can solve this by grouping the two speakers I want to play different music or adjust the volume on each speaker.

So why not just settle with this? Well, since the other setup not is possible I will :-)
But the 14 speakers are in a café, and with 20 bartenders (some only working 1 or 2 times a week) they will eventually mess up the group setup and then they will forget to group speakers and so on.
So to keep it as simple as possible and instead of adjusting the volume on 7 speakers one at a time (if I want to adjust Room 😎 it would be easier if it was one room.
And it is just more simple to group 4 rooms than 14 rooms :-)

But it can't be done the way I want, so we will just do it this way 🙂
Didn't realize we were talking about a commercial installation here. That being said, I'd be telling the bartenders that if they "break" your setup, you're going to dock them a day's pay.... :)

Understand why you want it "better" than it is, but I don't think it will be coming anytime soon.
Sounds like a bunch of bandwagon BS. Software is so easy.
Anyway, the grouping function is not great because it breaks down at least once every couple weeks. Then, you have to group them back. Why can't it remember this?
To help the OP with his staff control this issue, Maybe name each "Zone 1 speaker A", "Zone 1 Speaker B", "Zone 2 Speaker A"... That way the users need to just put zones together. Although Volume balancing is lost, too. They end up all going to the same level. For the price, you would think these $.02 memory chip functions could be handled like the quality of sound they put out.