Why did I choose Sonos?

[randy]

I would like to offer a few thoughts about Sonos as well as describing the solutions I used to make my system fit my needs.

I had originally settled on a Monoprice whole house audio system, because of the cost difference compared to Russound. There were two problems, 1) I didn’t want to cut holes in walls and ceilings, to mount speakers and controls, then run a bunch of wires to make it all work. One of the driving forces was to get a small number of TTS announcements to work throughout the house for important announcements or alerts.

For those not familiar with Sonos, it is an ecosystem that allows any number of wireless clients to be connected via WiFi. These devices can all have individual music sources or be grouped together using a single source. The beauty of grouping is that all clients are synchronized. You can play the same music source in every room and they will remain perfectly synchronized. Music sources can be your own library, Internet feeds like Deezer, Pandora, Amazon, etc. or even the music stored on any iOS device. Sonos has built a robust, flexible and very reliable architecture that is able to connect through your WiFi network or communicate using its own “SonosNet” bypassing traffic through your WiFi network.

Sonos makes speakers, low level audio devices known as “Connect” and amplified versions known as “Connect:Amp”. The Connect:Amp and Connect are stereo devices, the Play speakers are monaural devices, but can be linked as a stereo pair. It is even possible to build a 5.1 channel sound system out of Sonos components.

My brother has been a Sonos advocate for years, so I purchased a Play 3 to try it out. I was initially very pleased with how the mid-range speaker sounded and liked the way the application worked. I added a couple more Play 3s so that I could understand how they grouped, could be controlled by applications and most of all how they would work with Dirk’s plug-in. I was very happy with all aspects, went through a reasonably shallow learning curve with the plug-in and decided this was the route I was going to follow. My wife was thrilled to be able to play music from her phone and a number of other sources anywhere we had a Sonos device. The iOS and PC apps all work similarly and were very easy for my wife to learn, understand and use. Ease of use for the rest of the household is one of the most difficult things to achieve.

With the first experiments proving successful, it was time to think about building out the system. We were very happy, but not thrilled with the sound of the smallish Play 3 speakers, so I purchased a lot of 9 broken Play 5 (Gen 1) speakers. One was missing parts and physically broken internally, so I stripped it and threw it away. I was able to repair 5 of the remaining 8. Each one had a different part failure, but I was able to find replacement parts and make them work. We placed the play 5s around the house and built a nice system. We added a couple of Play 1s in the bathrooms to round it out. TTS announcements worked as needed, the ability to control the system with iOS apps and Dirk’s plug-in were also exactly what we wanted.

This was all completed about the end of October.

Then came the rethink. We have two rooms with nice 5.1 channel surround systems, the master bedroom and the living room. Our basement has a similar setup that is 7.1. All three are powered by Yamaha RX-A3000 series receivers. They have very nice JBL L820 and LC2 center speakers and a Polk sub woofer in the Living Room and Master Bedroom. The Media Room has two sub woofers and additional back speakers. It also has an LED TV for casual watching and a JVC D-ILA projector with a 100" powered screen for movie nights. Setting up a pair of Sonos Play 5s in two of the rooms and a single Play 5 in the master bedroom worked well and sounded surprisingly good, but adding speakers to each room was ugly, did not add to household approval and simply didn’t provide anywhere near the sound quality of the main system. We really liked the Sonos ecosystem, so we wanted to figure this out.

The new plan was to keep Play 1s in 3 locations where music was secondary, but we wanted announcements. The other 6 zones were going to get ZP-120 Connect:Amps. We didn’t want to give up the sound systems in the three rooms, but we also wanted it to be easy to use Sonos from the iOS and other apps. We wanted the receivers and entertainment systems to work as, without intervention from HomeSeer.

We carefully planned out our system, with 9 Sonos zones, 3 with zone players, speakers and subwoofers, my office, our exercise room and my workshop. The three sound system rooms would also get a ZP-120. We chose the Connect:Amp over the Connect, so that we wouldn’t need to have the receivers on in order to play Sonos. The last three zones are the Play 1s.

My next post will go into the final design and solutions. We have now been using it since the beginning of December and really like it.

[randy]

In the three rooms where we already had sound systems we wanted Sonos to play out of the front right and left speakers and subwoofer. The Sonos ZP-120 has a subwoofer output. We also didn’t want to have our TV or movie watching audio interrupted by a HomeSeer announcement. Each of the Yamaha receivers provides 2 12V trigger outputs. I configured one of them to go high whenever the main zone is on. This trigger output drives a 12V 4PDT relay. A 4PDT must be used, because Sonos uses Class D Tri-mode amplifiers, so the grounds for the speakers float. When the receiver is on, the front speakers are connected to the receiver, when the receiver is off the front speakers are connected to the Sonos. The subwoofer is connected to both by low level outputs. All that was needed was a little calibration to make sure the subwoofer level was correct for either source.

The new plan allowed us to keep the clean look of each room, below is the living room. The speakers are similarly mounted in the other two rooms.



This took care of Sonos playing through the main speakers, whenever we weren’t using the Receiver in any of the three rooms. Now we needed to solve a secondary problem, we wanted to be able to hear announcements even if we are watching TV. Enter a second relay for the rear speakers and an Arduino output to control it. With the relay off the relay connects the rear speakers to the main receiver, with it on they are connected to the Sonos ZP-120. The Living Room and Media Room were close enough to my two main Arduinos to simply run a control wire pair to the rear speaker relays in each room. The Master bedroom was far enough away, that I put an Arduino UNO in that room. Here is a picture of that setup, the other two rooms just have the relays. The two large relays are for speaker switching, the smaller one is an opto-isolated relay to allow the Arduino to control a 12V relay. The board on the left is an Arduino with an Ethernet shield the one on the right is a dual 5V-12V power supply.



When we are listening to music or watching TV on the primary system, the sound comes out of all 5 speakers. If The Sonos is playing or an announcement comes through while we are watching TV, the Sonos plays through the surround speakers. Since the trigger output from the receiver controls the front speaker relay and the rear speaker relay connects with the rear speakers in the normally closed position, the main system operates as it always did, only operations performed by HomeSeer will change this.

If we are listening to the Sonos alone, the sound comes out of the front speakers.

The logic is made possible because we monitor the power consumed by all three receivers and Dirk’s Sonos plug-in tells us the status of all Sonos players. Remembering that switching the main speakers is purely controlled by the trigger output from the receivers, HomeSeer doesn’t have anything to do with this function. When we are playing music or a HS announcement is made, the Sonos player will be playing.

In essence it is

• If a Sonos is playing in one of the three rooms with a multi-channel sound system and the receiver is off, the sound comes out the front speakers
• If a Sonos is playing in one of the three rooms where the power consumed by the receiver is greater than 40 watts, the relay for the rear speakers is turned on by an Arduino output so the Sonos will play through the rear speakers, while the front are still playing the main system.
• Subwoofers go to sleep, but they still consume 20-35 watts even when they are in standby. If neither the Sonos nor the main Receiver are playing the subwoofer is turned off. There is a 60 second delay before it is turned off. If either the receiver or Sonos is playing the subwoofer is turned on. There is a 60 second delay on the Sonos, to keep it from turning the subwoofers on for announcements. I use the same power control logic for the subwoofers in the other three rooms that don’t have media receivers.

[dcorsus]

Nice!!

[randy]

Someone asked me in a PM about the structure of the events.

Here is the rear speaker relay on and off control event. Before an announcement, I run all three of the speaker on events (Living Room, Master Bedroom and Media Room) so that the speakers will be ready for an announcement. The off control has a 10 second timer to make sure they stay on long enough for the ZP-120 to begin playing. As soon as the announcement or Sonos music playback has been paused or stopped for at least 10 seconds, the rear speaker relay is returned to its normally closed position.



And here is the subwoofer control.