The HDMI1/ARC slot on the TV is connected to the ARC slot on the Soundbar
The Blu-Ray player a HDMI cable going to the HDMI 2 slot on the TV
The Blu-Ray player has another HDMI cable going to the HDMI2 slot on the Soundbar

emocrat fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Nov 30, 2022

• The small speakers: One, One SL, IKEA models, are great value and sound good. I have four of them including a stereo pair in my bedroom which I love. Anything competing is either super limited or a loss leader surveillance microphone. The Five is OK but you're getting into "real" audio gear territory at that point.
  
• The subs are hilariously priced, even the "cheap" one. They also have a fraction of the output of a "proper" third party one.
  
• The price of the Port at $450 is practically criminal. 99% of the hardware to do what it does is embedded in the $99 IKEA speaker. This frequently goes on sale for $80 and is a bit perfect Airplay endpoint. That said like emocrat I bit the bullet and bought a Connect way back.
  
• The Amp is expensive but it's a legit piece of hardware. It could be a single centerpiece for a whole properly good 2.1 living room system with box speakers and a real sub. Receivers in its price range are crammed with more features but they won't sound better and have crappy streaming platforms [see below]
  
• The Arc and Beam seem OK and people apparently loving love being able to have wireless surround speakers [you can also do this with the Amp]. I'm not much of a soundbar person, though. Expensive, underpowered subwoofers limit home theater performance.
  
• God drat it I wish they made some kind of remote. There's an IKEA one but I haven't tried it.
  

• Initial setup is probably quicker and easier than any equivalent system. It's pretty much the easiest to use and most reliable "smart" thing I've ever encountered.
  
• Clearly better than Play Fi, HEOS and other smaller vendor gear. It's probably roughly equivalent to BluOS but Bluesound/NAD hardware is even more expensive
  
• A lot of the benefit is if you have a large [but not too large, there's a 65,000 song limit] music library and being able to switch back and forth between local and streamed music with a single interface. You can make playlists that include both.
  
• It has better coverage of less common streaming services than anyone else. I use Mixcloud pretty regularly and it's supported.
  
• You can only play music through Sonos to their hardware, so if you want to listen on your phone or computer you have to use something else. This is ultimately what pushed me towards Roon [additional incredibly expensive software I use on top of my Sonos you should probably ignore for now]
  
• Good Airplay support
  

• Sonos releases products at a glacial pace. A lot of their bugs like the 65k limit have been around for actual decades. They will never add bluetooth. Basically buy it for what it is now and don't expect it to improve over time.
  
• They are never going to "open up" their system more, at least not unless they need to because they're in trouble. They make too much money the way they're doing things now, particularly in the home install market where they can sell a closet full of connects to a system integrator for a big house and the customer won't blink at $500/room.
  
• The whole S1/S2 thing is done but left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. This is the downside of having incredibly long product lifecycles, people get used to what you have. They stepped on their own dicks a bunch of times with that and while I hope they learned their lesson something similar could happen again.
  
• Like every company that sells actual hardware they're looking for recurring revenue streams, right now it's just a radio service that exists for no reason.
  

qirex fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Nov 30, 2022