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Comment by cicloid | Hacker News Reader

So basically what a Sonos does, as a standard.

Sonos doesn't have the ability to sync audio with video, only audio with audio, correct? We recently acquired a Sonos Playbar and the interplay between HDMI/Optical Out/TV processing made the lip syncing a nightmare. Still not sure it's entirely solved.

Typically, you need to plug in any external speakers (including the Sonos Playbar) to the optical out on your TV itself. This port is intentionally placed at the end of the TV's (latency-inducing) processing chain, and will get you properly synced audio.

If you connect to the optical out on any other devices, you're pretty much guaranteed to have sync problems.

I thought sonos can't even do multi channel audio. It's just a kind of mesh network. Wisa was supposed to fix that but for some reasons it seems it failed to get mainstreem

No, you can have multiple speakers synced together with Sonos. It works very well; I've never noticed any drift. As I recall, this is why Sonos devices can't just run off a home wifi network and require a bridge.

Ok, but can you play multi-channel? Like a 5.1 system in a home theater ? As far as I know it's not possible. Multiple speakers playing the same content is not really multi channel.

They sell 5.1 systems:

http://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/wireless-5-1-surround-sound-...

That's right but in my defence that's really a 3.1 system as you have lf, rf and center in a single speaker. It's also worth to note that lf, rf and center speakers are the most demanding/used channels so IMHO the problems were avoided not fixed. Putting all your channels into a single speaker is not really what I thought when I heard of wireless multi-channel audio. I also don't know what resolution they use because it's not mentioned in their specs but something tells me it's not 24 bit at least not for the separate speakers. I've tried multichannel wifi audio but it just doesn't work either due the buffering or the sync issues. I ended up with some proprietary technology with multiple antennas based on the 5GHz band but you need clear line of sight and that's not always convenient. Anything obstructing the line of sight may make your speaker fail to play. To sum it up: it's true that sonos has a 5.1 system but that's really a half backed solution. It's actually a 3.1 configuration. This may work for some people just like bluetooth speakers work for so many. Can they play in a real/native 5.1 configuration(6 separate speakers)? that's hard to say. What about real 7.1 or the latest configurations such Atmos/DTS:X ( 5.1.4 or 7.1.4)? That's impossible without hardware changes. Some would say that even standard ethernet is not good enough for multi channel audio(thus avb[0] or [1]powerlink) so I can't really see how standard wifi could work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_Powerlink

Play bar gives you the front 3, you can set up a pair of 1s as your rear left/right and then the sonos sub gives you the .1. So they do support 5.1 right now.

Sonos hasn't need a bridge for 2 years now. In my setup at least, it works just fine without it. See, e.g.:

http://www.techhive.com/article/2601036/sonos-speakers-now-r...

Ah, ours are at least two years old.

It was a software, not a hardware, update that enabled this feature

Sonos was the first. But now everyone is doing it, so it's cool to see it standardized.

...or Airplay.

Airplay works on top of wifi and it can't play multichannel audio. Not to mention the crappy experience when the video is "buffering". Hopefully this standard will fix such issues but I have big doubts.

I thought this too until recently, but Airplay does, in fact, support multichannel audio in sync–but only through playing music to speakers through iTunes Desktop [1], as its the only client to officially implement it. Of course, we don't see more multichannel Airplay clients because it is my understanding the standard is proprietary...

[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19497?locale=en_US

Is there ANY multi channel client? I tell you: no! And it can't really be because Apple specifically limits AirPlay output to one single destination. It's because wifi sucks and as it is and it just can't work on multi channel(things will get out of sync, some channels will buffer while others will play etc). If you read the avb specs you will underatand why. Wifi needs hw changes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging

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