Hey everyone, thanks for coming to my channel. My name is Chris and in this video, I'm gonna show you how I accidentally turn my Sonos 1 into a pretty epic sound bar. Let's get into it. I know I know you read the title, you come here, you might be asking yourself, why am I using a Sonos 1 as a sound bar? Doesn't Sonos already sell sound bars? And the answer is yes. They have the 399 beam, they have the 599 play bar, and they just came out with the $799 sound bar called the ARC. Of course, if you're looking for a sound bar, then I would definitely recommend you check out some of those products if they're within your budget because they are pretty pricey. But for my purposes, this video is just about how I used my Sonos 1 as a sound bar. I didn't specifically get it to use it as a sound bar. It was actually a gift for my brother, and it was all by accident that I realized that I could use the Sonos 1 as a sound bar for my TV and my living room. So before I showed you how to get this all set up, I just wanted to share how this came to be. So my little brother actually gifted me a Sonos 1. He knows I've been 1 in 1 for a while, and a few weeks ago, he surprised me with one of them from Best Buy. This is the White Sonos 1, second generation. So this is the one that has a voice assistant. I won't say their name, but there's two major ones. Particularly, I'm using the one that's offered by Amazon. But yeah, the intent for the Sonos 1 was to replace my really old Amazon Echo Dot that connected to that really old sound bar and a few purposes there. I just wanted to make the set up a little cleaner. Those two things took up a lot of space on the TV stand. So being able to replace that with the Sonos 1 that just looks nicer, takes up a little bit of space, and it has a voice assistant, I was all for that. So now that we understand the primary purpose of this Sonos, now we can get into how I accidentally realized how to use it as a sound bar. So it all started with Lord of the Rings. I haven't seen the movies, my wife saw the movies she was younger with her dad, but I just personally never saw them. So last weekend, we were just scrolling through HBO Max just trying to figure out what to watch because for us, that's a challenge, trying to figure out what we wanna watch together. So we were just scrolling through HBO Max and we decided to watch Lord of the Rings. So we were watching this in the bedroom on my Samsung 55 inch TV that I got from Costco and I mean, the picture was good, the audio was good, but you could tell that something was missing from the experience of watching Lord of the Rings. I don't know, watch it in the movie theater, but my wife did and you could tell that there was just something lacking from the overall experience of watching that movie. So fast forward to the next day, pick up the movie where we left off and we're watching it in the living room. So the living room is just a LG 50 inch TV that I got on Black Friday three or four years ago. So nothing special about the TV, but it is connected to my Apple TV 4K. So that's where we watch all of our content, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, like anything that requires streaming is all done on the Apple TV. And as you know, the Apple TV has a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, crappy remote. So sometimes it takes a while, you have to press the buttons a few times just to get it to connect. So after pressing the button a whole bunch of times on the remote, I got to the audio selection screen and that's when I realized that my sono showed up as one of the options. So whenever I scroll down on the remote, I clicked on the sonos option, went to the HBO Max app and started Lord of the Rings. The audio was just way better than what was coming out of the TV. And I just did some adjusting on the volume just to make sure that the right amount of volume was coming out from the sonos and the TV. And it just made the movie way better. And keep in mind, this is still the first movie. We actually watched the second and the third movies. Last weekend and we just finished the last one yesterday. And I can tell you that just watching it with the audio coming from the sonos, it was a totally different experience and had I just watched it from the internal speakers of my TV. So a few good things happened there. I realized that this was an option that I could use my sonos one as an audio source for basically anything that I watch on my Apple TV. And two, I finally understand all the Lord of the Rings memes. Like, one does not simply walk into mortar. Like, I know what that means now. So that's pretty cool. All right, so now that that's out of the way, let's get into how you can make your sonos one, your own sound bar for your own bedroom TV, home theater experience. So here's what you need so that you can get this to work for yourself. So what you need is a sonos that supports AirPlay 2. So I'm using the sonos one, but of course, you can use the sonos play five or you can use the sonos one SL, which has a microphone. If you're using like a sonos beam or an arc or a sound bar, then you don't even need this option because they're sound bars. That's what they're supposed to do. The second thing you'll need is an Apple TV 4K. And the reason you need this is because this is using the AirPlay 2 support. So you're actually casting the audio from your Apple TV to your sonos in order to get all of this to work. Once you have your Apple TV, once you have your sonos, this is what you have to do. Step one, you want to make sure that they're both on the same wireless network. So in my case, both my TV and my sonos are hard wired via ethernet to my internet. So that was no issue. Step two, you want to go to the Apple TV homepage where all of the icons are laid out in the grid and you want to press and hold the play button. So whenever you press and hold the play button on the Apple TV remote, you'll get a list of audio choices and this is where you'll see your sonos as one of those options. Quick note here too, if you have a pair of AirPods, you can actually use your AirPods as an audio source as well. And these are the similar steps you would use to get here. Step three, you want to select the sonos that you want to use as your output. So what's cool here is that you can select multiple sources. So if you have multiple sonos around your living room or wherever you're watching TV, you can select multiple options. So for me, I had audio coming from my TV and the sonos itself. But if I had two sonos kind of like in a surround sound or stereo, I'm not an audio file. So I don't know what they're correct terms. I only had one, so I just selected my living room sonos and then I exited out of this menu. And that's it. Kind of. Here are a few things that you should keep in mind if you're trying to use this solution because as you know, the sonos isn't intended to be a sound bar. So there are a little bit of a quirks that you have to get used to or you have to consider if this is something that you plan on doing. So I don't use the sonos every time that I'm watching TV. I mostly just do it if I'm watching longer YouTube videos, streaming TV or watching a movie or watching sports or anything like that. Thank goodness that the premier league is back. But I only use it for those cases. If I'm just watching like a short video or just trying to pass some time, like I don't go through the effort of setting up the sonos just because I don't think sound will make that big of a difference on what I'm watching. You might also have to reconnect your sonos to your Apple TV every now and then. If your TV turns off or if your Apple TV goes to sleep. So another thing to keep in mind. Volume control was also pretty interesting. I'm not sure if it was limited to just the TV model that I had, but whenever I paired my sonos with my Apple TV and I tried to adjust the volume on my remote, it would only adjust the volume on the TV. There's like three different ways that I found that I had to go through in order to adjust the volume on my sonos. The first one was going back to the home screen and going to where you select the sonos as your audio source. You're able to adjust the volume there. The second was opening the Sonos controller app on my iPad or my iPhone and adjusting the sonos volume there. And the third one was physically getting up and adjusting the volume of the sonos. So if you're watching a movie that's typically an hour, two hours, or for me, Lord of the Rings is like three and a half hours, you don't have to do a lot of adjusting on the volume. But if you're watching YouTube videos and TV and the volume is different depending on what you're watching, then that can be a little bit of a hassle. Lastly, it takes a second or two for the audio to start coming out of the sonos. I'm guessing this is because this is using AirPlay and it's wireless and it just takes a little bit of time for the audio to get from the Apple TV to the sonos. So it takes a little bit of time for it to come out. It's not that big of a deal. There wasn't a noticeable lag on the audio and what I was watching. So it was still a great viewing experience but just something to note that if you play something and the sound doesn't come out of the sonos right away, just give it a few seconds and then it'll start coming out. All right, and that's how you set up your sonos as a soundbar and that's how I accidentally figured how to do this. So I thought it was pretty cool. That's why I thought it was worth sharing with you. So if this is something you already do, like let me know, is this something that's written on a box that I missed something? Is this something that you wanna do? Let me know in the comments down below what you think. Also, if you do have a sonos, like how many do you have? Because I only have one, but I'm immediately trying to find opportunities for me to get more. Before I got one, I had heard of a sonos trap of the sonos trap. I don't know if that's really what it's called, but once you buy one sonos, you kinda just start buying more and your house eventually becomes a sonos house. So let me know in the comments down below. If you have one or multiple, how many do you have, what's your setup look like? Any recommendations on what I should get next? Let me know in the comments down below. I'd love to hang out with you guys. If you thought this video was helpful, give it a like so that other people can see it as well. If you like the videos that I'm making or you wanna get notified of when I make more, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and the bell button so you get notified of when new videos hit the channel. And lastly, if you wanna hang out, leave a comment down below. I'm always interested to see what y'all think and have conversations in the comments. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.