How do I make my Sonos speakers stay connected to each other?
July 14, 2021 7:18 PM   Subscribe

I have Sonos speakers in two other rooms in my house, and a sound bar in the living room. How do I convince Sonos to ALWAYS play through all three?

My TV is connected to the soundbar, but if I want it to play in the bathroom and kitchen, I have to do it on the app. Similarly, if I want to play something from my computer to all three speakers, I have to play computer to one of the speakers, and then in the Sonos app tell it to do all three. Is there a way to make it automatically play to all three? Yes, I tried googling. It's a Sonos Beam and two One SLs.
posted by Charity Garfein to Technology (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Have you grouped them? It sounds like your setup may be somehow more complicated, but I've grouped my speakers and a single button push starts them in all my rooms.
posted by mark k at 7:31 PM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


Yes, same as Mark, I have had Sonos for years and my experience is that outside of the random weird issues, they stay grouped once I group them.
posted by primethyme at 8:45 PM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: What do you mean "group them"? (I'm also hoping not to have to push a button; just to keep it all playing together, all the time.)
posted by Charity Garfein at 9:11 PM on July 14, 2021


Hmm. The system is definitely designed to be accessed through the app, but in my experience (two sonos 1s, a playbar, and a 5) if I set it up to play everywhere, that's the default until I change it. "Group them" in my mind means going into the app, clicking on "system" (on the iPhone, the middle icon on the bottom showing the stylized bar chart), and then clicking the little icon on the top right of the "kitchen" or "living room" or whatever card, which brings you to the option where you can select the rooms where music is played. Again, much like the previous respondents, once I've established which speakers should be playing at the same time that seems to be the default until I change it.
posted by exutima at 9:52 PM on July 14, 2021


Like exutima described, on my app if I click on the little icon next to the room name I get the option to group together rooms by selecting from a checkbox list. After I do that the systems are combined into one box.

And by "push one button" I referring to the "play" button. :)

In fact, at this point it'd be harder for me to stop it from playing everywhere. It's just the default behavior.
posted by mark k at 10:33 PM on July 14, 2021


In my system, I have noticed it works like this:
1. Sonos allows you to designate which rooms various devices are in. It sounds like you have 3 rooms.
2. Sonos also allows you to group more than one room together - for example you can have a "party mode" where a sound from a given source is routed to all speakers in each of your dedicated rooms.
3. However, the TV will always grab the soundbar as an output when it is turned on. I might have had a sound playing from a non-tv source to all the speakers in my house - but turn on the TV and it will play through the soundbar.
4. It is, however, possible to then set the TV sourced sound to play in other/all rooms.

The behaviour mentioned in #3 is determined by something called "TV Auto-play" under the Soundbar settings in the Sonos amp. If you turn this off then the TV will not automatically take over the soundbar when it is turned on. I believe this setting is on by default.
posted by rongorongo at 11:37 PM on July 14, 2021


Response by poster: Yes, rongorongo is describing my scenario. I want to turn on the TV and have it automatically play in the kitchen and bathroom, without going into the app and selecting party mode. (Turns out they *are* grouped, but I still have to go into the app to select "everywhere" instead of just TV.) Gonna stop threadsitting now.
posted by Charity Garfein at 11:50 PM on July 14, 2021


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