I recently attended a Sony road show which had representatives there from Sony Japan showing new TV's, projectors & receivers. The person responsible for the Receivers & Software was there and spoke with her about solutions.

Mentioned that many people in Sonos keep their rooms grouped and you run into the issues state above when music connect is activated. i.e. fight between watching TV and switching to Sonos as well as the pausing of the grouped Sonos
when receiver switches to TV.

We discussed some options. Music connect can't be setup to toggle off/on, even with discrete codes, since once its turned off the settings are gone and you have to discover the Sonos device(s) again. That would be a large undertaking if possible to do that in the software.

So, proposed an option in settings to establish Music Connect priority. So, either Music Connect Device (Sonos) or non-Music Connect device. Thus, if set to Music Connect Device, then it would operate the same way as current. If set to non-music connect device, the system will not auto-switch to the input if the connected sonos is playing. Thus, when grouped it will not then switch from TV, to Sonos when the grouped Sonos zones start playing. However, even when the priority is set to non-music connect, if the receiver is in standby, it will still turn on and switch to Sonos input and play. Also, if in this scenario (non-music connect priority) someone switches to watch TV that the pause command should not be sent to the Sonos so that the music can continue un-interupted in the other grouped zones. So, sort of the best of both worlds.

I also asked for discrete codes (IR, IP 7 RS-232) to activate these options with a control system. So, you then can set the music connect priority in the control system programing for finer control. She didn't think this would be difficult to implement. Hopefully they do it soon since it would solve some of the issues and make the music connect feature really useful.