I finished working at a house that had 5 different receivers, some 2 channel and some surround. They fed, independently of course, 6 or 8 different rooms of audio. Pulled them. Now Sonos works very nicely everywhere.

Two rooms had monitors fed by component video, with HDMI to component converters. One room had a cat5 between TV and the component shelves, and the other did not. The cat5 room allowed for a PlayBar and Connect:Amp to accomplish 5.1.

The other room was an issue, with no cat5 in place, and the rear channel speaker wiring coming out to a cabinet 15 feet away, with no wire runs possible.

It did have a shielded 4 conductor cable between the two, which I punched down to pins 1,2,3 and 6, hoping I could interconnect the PlayBar and Connect:Amp. No go.

***Take careful note that the app now allows the Connect:Amp to set up for surround, no command line setup needed. HOWEVER, I have had two setups now which allowed me to choose the Connect:Amp, paused to configure the room, produced no error messages, but DID NOT WORK. No surround speaker output. I think it's a bug in the app and let them know.

I ran a cat5 across the floor and added the amp again and surround came to life. Went back to the four conductor and it died. So that was a fail.

Went back to the truck, grabbed a BEAM and an AMP. They set up for surround, with no Ethernet connection required, and began playing very quickly. Wish I'd tried it a couple hours earlier! It's a nice problem solver. No cable required. The Beam is the only part of the entire system connected to the router, BTW. Everything else is SonosNet.

CONNECT:AMP must be wired when used for surround. AMP can be wireless.

Didn’t try PlayBar and new amp. Suspect no.

You know don’t you that Sonos doesn’t do true surround sound? Like Bose they don’t do Dolby decoding. They do simulated surround

This is not true of Bose SoundTouch 300, Soundbar 500, or Soundbar 700
Supported audio format: Dolby Digital, DTS*
*Pulled from www.Bose.com

Sonos supports Dobly Digital. If not native dolly Digital it simulates surround

From Bose's website...
The Soundbar 500:
Supported audio format: Dolby Digital

The Soundbar 700 does support both Dolby and DTS, as does the Soundbar 300.

I know the Playbar can't support Dolby Digital+, can the Beam (via HDMI ARC)?

Customers don't need to know anything about this, but they do need their soundbar to play everything they try - otherwise it's an tension filled phone call to you when they can't play a movie their kids want to watch...

Unfortunately, the Beam is a steaming piece of crap for sound quality compared to the playbar. We just installed one for a cheap master bedroom setup and I was stunned by how bad it was. Sounded like a $99 special soundbar from amazon. YMMV

This is a fairly new feature then. Because their lifestyle theater in a box systems didn’t previously. I made a BB salesman nearly crap himself when I pointed that out once.

Didn’t we get into this here when the Playbar came out and figure out that if the TV puts out Dolby Digital, the playbar can accept it, but it still doesn’t do true surround decoding in the end? I do know one big problem was almost no TV would send a digital signal out except for OTA audio.

The Playbar decodes Dolby Digital, it does not do DTS. Usually not a problem except for Blu-ray. If you have a Blu-ray in the system get one that can convert DTS to Dolby as some discs do not have a Dolby track on it.

Fins is correct that many older TVs did not decode Dolby (or DTS) and therefore only requested PCM from the source. So they only receive PCM through their HDMi inputs. If the TV only accepts PCM through its HDMI inputs that is all it can repeat to the optical connection. For OTA and its apps it could do Dolby. Before it was only Sony and one or two other brands that could handle Dolby. Today, almost all TVs have Dolby decoders and repeat the Dolby signal to the optical connection. This is not an issue anymore for the Sonos Playbar.

This is fairly new, the 2016 redesigned soundbars and Lifestyle systems took a lot of input from the custom integration community and implemented the features that were technologically and financially feasible. The Lifestyle systems now have these Codecs built in.

Supported audio formats: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, Multichannel PCM.
Video source compatibility: Support for six 4K/60 video sources (HDMI 2.0/HDCP 2.2)

I work for the company now but have been in the custom integration industry for 12 years.

So finally has caught up to every other manufacture, that has had this for 15+ years. Nice.
Now with Atmos, DD+, etc... BOSE might have a codec for those in another 10+ years?
"Better sound thru marketing" :)

Brad, you have the tagline wrong, it is "Better Sound Through Research" but I could understand the mistake, given the salt that is poured out on this forum.
DD+ is already implemented in current Lifestyle systems. Those Lifestyle systems are 5.1 (dual Bass Modules are output in mono) thus have no mechanical ability for Atmos. Atmos systems are incredible, when done correctly.