Sonos soundbar - buyer beware

-

I love Sonos products, but if you want to get the full surround sound experience out of the Playbar, SUB and two Play:1 speakers you could be in for a frustrating experience. The reason being that the Playbar and associated speakers are driven by a single optical input which in most cases has to be connected to your TV's optical output. This works fine for the TV and it's built in apps but in many cases the TV will not pass through proper surround sound if you've selected an external HDMI input such as an XBox or a DVD player. Added to this if the device in question is outputting DTS audio then even if you could get this to the Playbar it would refuse to play it (See this Sonos forum discussion for an example). Sonos have summarised the situation in Maximizing PLAYBAR Sound from your Television

If your TV doesn't pass through surround sound then a commonly suggested solution is to add in a TOSLINK audio switch. In most cases these have to be switched (via a remote) to match the source chosen from the TV addding clutter and complexity.

If you're like me then you bought Sonos as it provides an elegant minimal wire solution to a surround sound setup. The other key win with Sonos is that you know it will be easy to use for everyone in the house as it is designed to be intuitive. Adding a TOSLINK audio switch that will need to be switched manually alongside changing to TV source is both inelegant and unintuitive unless you have a good understanding of how things are wired up. This goes against the very reason for spending big £££ on Sonos in the first place!

As a result I'm investigating whether I can somehow get an optical audio switch to automatically follow whichever source is selected on the TV. I'm hoping to do this using a Raspberry Pi which will be connected to the TV via HDMI to be able to listen for changes in which source is selected (CEC commands). I can then use an IR device on the Pi to send the corresponding channel change command to the optical switch. The parts are on order, so watch this space to see how I get on ........

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Python to Automate Visio

-
There are lots of examples of automating office apps out there but Visio examples seem thin on the ground. I guess this is partly due to its relatively recent inclusion into the Office fold. The example below shows Visio code to create a diagram with two rectangles joined by a connector. Its written in Python and makes use of the win32com package provided by pywin32 . This is installed by default with ActivePython . I had some difficulty getting the makepy tool to see the Microsoft Visio 11.0 Type Library that showed up fine as a registered object in Visual Studio and Excel/VBA. In the end I had to explicitly point makepy at the VISLIB.DLL. That said the code below will work fine without this step as I don't make use of any of the Visio Constants. import os import win32com.client # Two lines below generated from the command: # python makepy.py -i VISLIB.DLL from win32com.client import gencache gencache.EnsureModule( '{00021A98-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}' , 0,
Read more

Microsoft accounts for children - Verify that you're an adult error

-
I recently bought a Windows 8 laptop for my son for his school work. However, after logging in with his email address (also used on an Xbox) he was unable to use any online features which are pretty key to Windows 8 and Office 365. As it was a child account he got prompted that he "needed permission to use this service” and to have an adult sign in. However, when I signed in as an adult to authorise this I was redirected to the following broken page: https://account.live.com/ChildConsent/PaymentCollection Verify that you're an adult Error When you verify your age with a credit card, Microsoft charges the card a one-time fee of $0.50 (50 cents), and a portion of the fee is donated to charity. Our system is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact customer support. (40101-[2]-04c6207c-5883-4e91-b47d-2e6febec6efc) I contacted Microsoft support via email and got the following reply (24 hours later) Upon investigating both a
Read more

The computer says no

-
I thought I’d finally bite the bullet and try to upgrade my parents broadband to a new provider. They have been on Demon forever, but the service has atrophied as they were first bought by Thus and then Vodafone. I visited the PlusNet and BT websites to find out what packages they could switch to only to end up with some rather strange errors: You don't have a compatible phone line. To provide you with a new service we will need to give you a new phone number The phone number and postcode supplied do not match; please try again. An online chat with PlusNet resulted in an impasse. Despite my parents having the number for 30 years apparently it wasn't valid and a new number was required - the computer says no! A bit of googling took me to the excellent BT community forums which showed this is a problem that other people have had. All the providers reference an Openreach database which contains phone numbers and addresses. It's entirely possible for this database to co
Read more