Creative Soundbar/Surround Help Required...

[Chrisdraper85]

Hi Guys,

We just moved house, with our 10-month old in tow, and am now trying to work out how to best to set up / invest in my home system.

At the old place, we had a smaller lounge which was ideally shaped for my traditional 5.1. Surround system (Onkyo receiver / Jamo speaker set) with the ability to stow cables away from small curious hands.

However, in moving to the new house, the shape of the lounge is considerably different and it presents me with a challenge… either I need to find a way to make my rear two speakers wireless (no simple route to run cables with either a door/fireplace in the way), or I need to replace the whole lot with something neater.

We have plans for Sonos players in other parts of the house so extending this to have a Sonos Playbar would be great from a music perspective but would be a serious step down for TV/movies, and I have concerns about the issues surrounding audio signals that this unit can decode.

Please can someone help me with advice either with solving the rear speaker issue, meaning I can keep my current system, or explain to me exactly the limitations of the Sonos playbar? I also plan to invest in a new TV at some point soon (looking maybe at the Samsung UE48HU7500) so understand that this might help in regard the types of signal which can be sent via Optical connection?

At this (early) stage no idea is off the table but need some help to create a solution which suits the new situation. Thanks!

 

[Deleted member 116933]

Sonos really dropped the ball on the play bar if you ask me If it had all the bells it would absolutely desamate the compition but as it stands it dosen't.

Pro's are as follow:

Sonos eco-system.

Wireless intergration

You can use the other play speakers as surround sound

Ir transmiter

App control

A digital input

Aan be placed flat upright or on a wall

Very tidy system

sounds pretty good and is room filling

Cons:

No HDMI coonectivity

No legacy audio in's (but this isnt major would just be nice)

Only one digital input

(Considering it can be expanded to surround sound) no DTS decoding BIG MISTAKE just to save themselves a few bob.

Need plug socket's in verious places to run the other speakers when expnanding.

Can get exspensive when expanding it to 5.1

Really this is what a i call a streamer's bar (Its sonos it what they do and they do it well ) in most if not all situations the audio from downloaded content (psn store, itunes, netflix blah blah) is encoded in dolby so really there's no problem. But they could have given it more than one digital input. As not all tv's output DD back out to optical when fed HDMI from an outside source. Infact i have never encounterd one. Not even my Top of the line 4k samsung dose it! not that i have found any how and i could be wrong there.

Personally i would look at the new Arcam Play Bar, Monitor Audio's ASB-2 and the Dali Kubix one. Some one on this forum has just gone through the process of listen to all those options and say's the Dali is by far the best. And it capable of streaming as well in various different ways.

Hope that helps