Stephen Shenefield
Email at Stephen@Vaetr.com
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(Alternate spellings, for search engines… Schenefield, Shenfield, Shenfeld, Schenfield, Scheinfield. Scheinfeld, Shennefield, Schennefield, Shenenfield, Shenenfeld, Schenenfeld, and my favorite, from Jerry Deutch whom I used to work with at Boston Acoustics, “The Shenterfelter.”)
Vaetr Design 
Hi Stephen
First of all thank you for your blog and providing such helpful information for people like me who love good quality music but don’t really understand technology required to set these things up.
I currently use Sonos playbar and two Sonos play 1 speakers and a Sonos subwoofer all connected through a Sonos bridge. My television’s optical out is connected to the playbar.
However the sound quality is not as amazing as I hoped. I’m thinking of biting the bullet and buying a pair of Bang & Olfsun Beolab 18 connected through their wireless CORE.
I am hoping these two speakers would work as the left and right channel for the TV and other music that I play through the Sonos system. I am also hoping to make the Playbar only act as a centre speaker for the 5.1 surround sound when watching films.
The main thing is that I don’t want to spend double the amount of money to get the B&O subwoofer and two additional surround speakers if I can get away with using either the Sonos subwoofer and surround speakers.
Any recommendations?
Best
Ethan
Ethan, thanks for this interesting question. I’m afraid there is unlikely a way to make this work, for a very basic reason. Even if you could get the Sonos and B&O playing the same audio source (regardless of channels), the systems are probably going to be out of sync by some number of milliseconds. All digital systems introduce latency, or delay, to the sound. You might perceive this as a slight echo, or you may just get really bad imaging. Have you ever been to a TV store when multiple TVs are playing the same program, and the audio is out of sync across the different brands of TVs?
Sound goes about 1 foot in a millisecond. If there is a 20 millisecond difference between systems, it would be like one system is 20 feet farther away. Imagine if your left & right speaker were 20 feet farther away than the center. In fact, if the B&O is delayed significantly from the Sonos, you might hear spatial sounds from the Sonos surround speakers before the L&R channel sounds they correspond to. Anyway, all digital systems introduce delay, so mixing signal paths usually doesn’t work very well. I hope this helps!