Vivaldi and Bach mainly. Elgar’s Cello Concerto in C Minor seems to be a favourite right now. They like Delius in the right mood, but unfortunately I do not.
Their favourite is Jaap Ter Linden’s recording of Bach’s Cello Suites, I think because it’s a little richer sounding than Yo-Yo Ma.
I read somewhere that dogs love cello music because it has the same tones as the human voice, and it certainly seems to calm them more than any other music.
I've spent a bunch of money on Sonos products in the past, and this app update basically killed it for me. Hopefully they can recover what they once had.
Did you stop using it? For me it seems like a huge improvement now.
I was really excited for the app update because the old app was really unstable. Then the update happened and it was like 10x worse than the old app. Then in the past few months it's gotten really solid (for me anyway) and I'm pretty happy with it.
It's strange. Tech journalism also has a bizarre fixation on them. There are tons of smart speaker companies out there but every time Sonos releases a product or really does anything they get tons of articles written about them.
> The company said it would cost between $20 million and $30 million to fix these issues and decided to cut about 6% of its staff.
> Spence, in October, had acknowledged mistakes surrounding the app's release and said that he and seven other company leaders would forgo their bonuses.
People out of a job because of you and you're gonna forgo your bonuses.
> Spence, whose total compensation was $5.19 million in fiscal 2023, took a roughly $72,000 cash bonus.
Don't worry, they'll fail upwards like many other executives who leave dumpster fires behind them.
Remember, though, conveniently, according to other executives, there's "only a limited number of people with the skills to be CEOs! So we have to pay them so much!"
CEOs who resign in disgrace do not actually do that well. Even on PR terms alone, it's a bad look to hire one as your CEO, even if they can make a good case that they "fell on their sword" rather than actually caused the catastrophe.
Yea. Poor guy. Having to stuff $2 million dollars into a measly cardboard box. I'll be he feels very chagrined and therefore I can relate to him now. :|
I recently switched my system to the S2 app and protocol. I was still on the old S1 app for the past years which worked fine, but I wanted to add new Sonos devices that only supported the S2-protocol/app.
I had checked the compatibility lists and found that one of my older sonos devices wouldnt be supported. But I accepted that as I really wanted to get a new Sonos Sub 4 (S2-only) to connect with my existing Sonos Playbar (which supports updating to S2).
The upgrade process was bad, had to restart and reset devices a couple of times.. but after a while I got all my existing Sonos devices onto S2.
When I added the Sub to the system, the app told me that I couldnt pair it with the playbar. The app adviced me to get one of the newer Sonos soundbars..
I'm very disappointed that they did this.. I fully understand that some devices dont work with a new protocol, but after consulting the compatibility list I expected my Sonos Playbar would be able to pair with all other S2 devices.. what is even weirder is that it is possible to link the playbar with the older Subwoofer devices on the S2 network, so why couldnt a newer device be able to do the same thing..
I returned the Sub and will be ditching Sonos (and probably any other system where you "buy into" the system only to be left with uncompatible gear after a while..
I think from now on I will separate the "smart" from the "hifi" so I can combine and upgrade as I please.. will probably give Dante a try for networked audio, they have a good track record with quality and compatibility. Its quite prosumer though. Perhaps not as user-friendly as Sonos (was).
But surely the main reason for declining sales is the app.
And not just the app itself but the fact that despite mounting criticism from the community they didn't immediately revert it. Thus demonstrating that they don't really care about their own, up until that point, very loyal customers.
Even as a Sonos owner and former fan who detests the app, I doubt the app is the reason for declining sales. Competition is.
Sonos has been around for many years now. When it launched, smartphones weren’t dominant. To control a Sonos you had to buy a controller specifically for it. It had its own wireless networking because WiFi wasn’t dominant. To use it with WiFi you needed to buy a separate bridge.
Online music services weren’t a thing like they are now. Music collections were on your local hard drive.
Back then the main competition for Sonos was paying a pro to hard-wire a speaker system into your house. I saw one of these about five years ago. Built into the wall in the kitchen was a cassette tape deck.
All that has changed. Now there are wireless speakers from JBL, Apple, Amazon, Bose, Google, and at least a dozen others. There’s Bluetooth. There’s AirPlay.
The Sonos app was ok for its time, but it’s an outdated model now. But at least the app used to be good at controlling Sonos. Now it’s not even great for that.
Without that outdated app model, there’s no reason to buy Sonos. Just pick from…anybody else. Many are cheaper and sound just as good. They don’t rely on an app, which is good-just use Airplay or Bluetooth.
As bad as the app is, it’s not a trigger of the decline of Sonos. Is just a symptom of it. The company has no future. Thus its release of headphones that don’t even integrate well with the Sonos system. These are just as pointless as its speakers.
Sonos makes great hardware. Those little mini speaker voice assistant things aren’t even in the same ball park. If they stick to their target audience they’ll be fine.
The mismatch here is Sonos’ owners want Sonos’ shares’ returns to at least keep up with SP500, and Sonos’ “target” audience wants speakers that sound great. And I don’t know that that is possible, given the market for speakers.
> Those little mini speaker voice assistant things aren’t even in the same ball park. If they stick to their target audience they’ll be fine.
Sonos' product is convenience, experience, and decent audio, in that order. Mini speaker voice assistant things equal/beat them in 2 of those categories, and high-end audio brands beat them in the third, leaving them holding the bad in the middle.
I use Sonos with Apple Music. Sonos has always been worse than Apple's app at browsing and searching (no idea who to blame for this, not the point), but I'd still use because it freed my phone/computer from the streaming duties. The speakers would handle it all once I got the stream started, and I wouldn't need to worry about being in range.
Also, multiroom. AirPlay does it OK. BT does not.
Now I'm using AirPlay, because it's working more reliably than the Sonos app. Which is a surprise, because it used to be the other way around.
If Sonos goes away, I guess I'll switch to HomePods? I'd rather not, given the prices and reliability, but I really can't imagine going to BT.
This is a more reasonable take. A single bad app launch cannot be the sole cause of a company falling apart to the point where they need to fire the CEO.
Boards are typically loyal to their CEOs (if the stock and revenue are performing well). They'll never fire a CEO who's coming out of a double-digit percentage growth last quarter.
Thus, the reason he fell out of the boards' favor is the low performance primarily and this was the last straw indeed.
It's hard for me to believe this is the main reason, but I'd love to be shown otherwise.
My instinct is to think it's fuel on a fire that was already burning - declining sales across the market, smart speakers taking a big slice out of Sonos' pie, and missing the boat on new markets (headphones) … and then a bad app release being the straw that broke the camel's back.
I actively tell friends and family to not try to imitate my home setup after this app garbage, where as I know specifically of a few friends who got into SONOS based directly on my recommendation and my demonstrations of the system.
When I was building my home back in 2022 the builder's audio person insisted I use Sonos. I said no. Then I said no another 100 times as this person just pushed and pushed and pushed. I eventually explained I didn't want to be vendor locked. Technology changes, and I don't want to be caught up in the BS.
I ended up designing the system myself. Wired in speakers, down to the basement where all the receivers are. I'm really happy with the result, and grateful I didn't get bullied into a specific Vendor.
Not everyone has this luxury. Once the drywall is up, it's really hard to get a decent whole home system and Sonos was the way to do that. My Dad and my father-in-law are in deep with Sonos. I can feel their anger and frustration when we're over. They really did their customers dirty.
Our home is pretty typical, with a few touches for my partner and I. It was definitely a more modest project for this particular builder, who typically builds homes 3x the size of ours.
I bought a Sonos Move 2 and it's a good speaker for what it is, but the connectivity is abysmal. AirPlay only works after I open the Sonos app, and sometimes wouldn't start at all until I put my phone into airplane mode and back on. I thought I was buying into something sure, but it's really disappointing.
Meanwhile, although twice the price, the Naim Mu-So Qb 2 I also bought recently is simply a marvel. Highly recommended.
I've been wondering for a while what the alternatives are.
I've got a Denon amp which has Heos, had random Alexa/Google Home devices previously, random amps with just Bluetooth or line in whatever. Thought there must be a way to sync these things, think previously there was the Google Chrome audio?
The WiiM devices seem nice but is that the price of entry to sync various unrelated audio ecosystems then?
Edit: had only seen the price of the highest end ultra device, this is actually very reasonable..
The other option for multi-room sync is AirPlay, on any device where that is possible (including wiim), so it’s pretty easy to solve multi-room audio these days.
Chromecast Audio lost the ability to do multi-room sync in a patent dispute with sonos
Unfortunately the wiim mini doesn't support the google cast ecosystem, only the more expensive devices. But the more expensive devices don't support airplay, which seems like an odd choice.
Conjecture on the wiim forums is that they ran into licensing issues so their two flagship products (Amp Pro and Ultra) don't have airplay, but weirdly all of their lower-end devices (Mini, Pro, Pro Plus) do.
WiiM is great i have 2 minis and 1 pro plus (good DAC for main speakers).
It somehow just works? Unreal. updates are bugfixes and new features…
Most unreal thing. Their phone app didnt require me to create account? When was last time i saw that?! It just found speakers, setup network and Bye, enjoy.
Snapcast is really good. I use it too. And on a recent Ask HN thread, I saw that someone had implemented it for ESP32 chips, so now I will try that out too.
It's less the app, more the business decision to tell people who had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on elaborate sound systems to go throw it all in the trash and start over, all at once.
Even Apple has never been that bad. They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
Well that is basically the model of the home stereo today.
People don’t realize sound was solved decades ago. How they could get the same stereo their grandfather could have ordered from the sears catalog and some cabinets from that sears catalog and that would be better sound than they are capable of ever perceiving, and how it would last them their entire life on that one stereo and probably the lives of multiple generations of family members. With IO that has always been a standard and always will be a standard. And a stereo like this isn’t even terribly expensive. A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
Instead they are sold soundbars and other crap tiny speakers that are not built to last, and might use specific io to connect over open standards that have been around for decades. They end up spending quite a lot more money for a shit experience that they are none the wiser that there are even alternatives to, without becoming audiophiles themselves consuming hundreds of pages of relevant media in that niche.
Yup. Newer products use various tricks to try to fill in the gaps that their physical reality can't overcome, but ultimately there's no getting around that reality.
I will say that the Sony upright boom boxes aren't to be slept on (and, if one is active, fat chance). They're quite good for their intended use cases (parties, and closed Best Buys during clean-up/inventory).
A 500W amp is probably a class A and can't really be made more efficient. It would still be 500W in 2024. Decades ago there were more efficient setups too, though of course now they sound better and also have lots more features and connectivity.
Amplifiers are quoted in peak output, not average (and play some games with other parameters e.g. resistance) to capture bigger-number-better sales. A 750w system will consume nowhere near 750w at typical listening volumes (just like your 750w PC doesn't use 18 kWh every day.)
Nailed it. You don’t even have to buy new stuff now.
Still rocking my early 90s system. Has required a couple of amp repairs (capacitors and sticky relay) but no big issue. Bought a Bluetooth DAC for streaming stuff. Job done.
Well one of those options lets me click a button on the phone in my pocket and play music across multiple rooms without running any wires between rooms. And similarly supports surround-sound audio without running wires around or inside walls.
I appreciate the value in a basic stereo system but there are some major differences in functionality to the end user.
Although I laughed out loud that they're asking $450 for that little box. That's pretty cheeky. The BOM on that must be $15. Margin level: Apple!
I wonder if they make it $450 to discourage doing just what I'm describing. To make people consider that for that kind of money they could buy one decent Sonos speaker and "simplify." Even though the Sonos speaker won't have anywhere near the sound quality or longevity of a 40-year-old stereo amp and speakers.
I have a 40-year old amp and speakers at home. My dad’s old stereo. Works fine, but it has so much static buzz.
Sounds great though. I’m just a bit hesitant to leave it powered on all the time which means I don’t use it much compared to my Bluetooth speakers. Old power supplies are not very efficient. They can get hot. There is also a decent amount of dust. And then there is the risk of some old cap blowing.
It's not properly grounded. I think I need to change out the power cable for one with ground, since the power cable that comes with the stereo only has two wires. There is a grounding point on the back of the chassis, but I don't have anything to ground it to except for the wall socket and at that point I should just use a proper power cable instead.
Neither a Sonos Port nor something like an Alexa Echo Dot nor the long-discontinued Chromecast Audio can awaken my stereo (whether from 1955 or 2025), select the appropriate input, and allow me to start playing music from my phone.
A Sonos speaker does allow that, though.
And so might a modern sound bar when combined with things like CEC and a regular-ass $25 HDMI Chromecast.
Yes, this is annoying. I settled for the cheap variant:
Let any hdmi device grab focus. The tv has spdif to the amp. Amp is always on the spdif input. I can change sources on the tv and the sound will follow, if I want youtube or spotify to play, I have to use chromecast on the tv or airplay to apple tv. It works ok for only a single cable. If the tv is off, the sound is off.
An amp will wake on hdmi (arc) input, but it won't wake on spdif. Unless you figured out something clever you still have to mess with multiple remotes and turn devices on/off individually.
The Sonos Port claims to be able to trigger your amp to turn on, though I don't know how it works. It's called a "12v trigger." Quick searching mostly found people asking on Reddit how the heck they could use it and mostly getting "most hardware doesn't support it."
I did find this interesting comment, though:
> You can get a secondhand Sonos Connect (Gen 2) for about $100 these days; they are the predecessor of the Port and are functionally the same for your purposes.
Also if I wanted to make a product like the Connect/Port I think I would spend another $3 in materials to add both an IR blaster (like the Harmony hub has -- it's so powerful it bounces off the walls perfectly well even to devices on different shelves) for amps with remotes, and to also offer as a separate purchase, a simple relay switch module for old stereos that don't have remotes -- they could be left on and have their power controlled by the Sonos.
As far as I know that's not a thing with any Sonos or competing product, though.
> though I don't know how it works. It's called a "12v trigger."
THX introduced the trigger port to allow one amp to start other amps. Before that amps would have a 110V passthrough socket.
THX trigger is a mono 1/8th inch / 3.5mm TS plug. Each device usually has one 12V in and a 12V out. While it's on, it'll output 12V at up to 30mA[1]. Due to current fluctuation and the low max amp it's recommended to use an opto-electronic isolator at the input.
THX originally introduced it to allow for home cinema surround. At the time commercially available amps only supported 2 channels, so the first THX systems had one receiver decoding the dolby signal, providing a line level output that you'd connect to multiple stereo amps. Due to the currents required the 110V passthrough wasn't an option, so 12V trigger was born.
Before 12V trigger existed the IR/Remote port, which allowed you to connect an external IR receiver to TVs, VHS recorders and Amps. This used the same plug, but would modulate the IR remote signal directly.
You could also use this to connect multiple devices and allow them to send remote control codes to one another. But that feature disappeared quickly due to limited compatibility.
In computers 12V trigger and remote ports inspired the I²C based DDC standard for VGA monitors, which allowed turning them on or off or changing settings. DVI and DisplayPort kept DDC as is, while HDMI expanded DDC into the CEC standard, which also allows controlling volume or sending media controls in a standardized way. Nowadays 12V trigger is mostly being replaced by HDMI CEC.
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1. Some devices support up to 80mA, Sonos even provides 100mA
Such a 12v trigger would be useful for a plain stereo amplifier, which are relatively simple things -- so simple that they may not even have a volume control.
This would allow a Sonos Port to have a dedicated amplifier connected (for driving one big stereo pair of speakers, or maybe an array of 70v distributed audio speakers, or who knows what) and control when it is powered on.
But it won't turn on my AV receiver (it has 12v triggers, but they're all outputs), nor switch its input mode appropriately.
(Yeah, sure. I can hack something up with an ESP32 with IR or RS-232 or even Lego Mindstorms or something from Switchbot, but Sonos buyers and hardware hackers are naturally somewhat diametrically opposed: A person who buys Sonos gear wants stuff that just works, not a new hobby.)
Chromecast Audios are still easy to pick up on eBay (or if you're in the UK, CeX, that's where I got one).
Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like)
Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect.
Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers.
I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025).
Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together.
You have one of those fancy hifis that has hdmi inputs and digital input selection and whatnot? Okay yeah you'd have to roll your own HDMI CEC automation again with a raspberry pi or whatever. Eminently doable.
There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to invest the time in doing loads of DIY shenanigans, but honestly it's pretty easy these days. For me, I think the "this is too complicated for me to implement" bar is not high enough to warrant buying Sonos
If only there was a small and very cheap device with wifi and aux out that you could plug into your old stereo, and instantly get the possibility to cast music directly from all your Android apps. Like a Chromecast but for Audio.
Seriously, this was a thing 10 years ago! I bought five, and they all still work perfectly. They do multiroom audio. They are compatible with the new Nest speakers. The only reason we can't have them today is corporate greed and rent-seeking MBA fuckers.
It is Probably just fine for the next 10 years. Chromecast audio are working great for me with my 70’s receiver and modern mini amp and Bluetooth speakers with line in.
A self-updating hardware/software combination from Google can never be a long term solution. Reliance on old units from eBay (or not!) cannot make that situation any better nor any worse.
Belkin SoundForm Connect + a physical power button amp. So many people chasing so much complexity, but this seems like the precursor to the WiiM(?) - first I'm hearing of that one.
(FYI, I chased that route, there is/was _one_ model that worked as an airplay2 device, but it still didn't feel as "native" as the modern HomePods ... icon was different, pairing was slower and slightly flakey... I moved to the belkin directly and have been happier. That and home assistant allowing single target airplay1 support to chrome cast / google nest devices sometimes is useful in a pinch)
Oh interesting. I was recently in my local HiFi shop (been a customer there for 40 years) to buy a new CD player and I noticed a WiiM box behind the counter in a display cabinet. I just assumed it was some sort of aging Nintendo Wii gimmick.
I'm being serious. If it has nothing to do with Nintendo then it's terrible branding.
There are a bunch of hifi brands that are making great products but don't have great name branding: SMSL, Topping, WiiM, Fosi (I own 3 of those 4, lol).
The upside is that they mostly seem to care about making good products rather than branding.
Right. I'll go back to the shop and have a closer look in that case. I like the idea of a streaming device to connect to a normal stereo system.
TBH, I didn't even know such devices existed. I thought that if I wanted to stream from Spotify without a PC I would need to go down the Sonos route, which I obviously don't want to do.
The problem with not having good branding is that potential customers walk right past your products. It's only chance comments in this thread that's made me take a second look. Thanks for the info :-)
My favorite recent discovery in the HiFi world (after losing interest about 15 years ago) are the WiiM network streamers. Connect them up to any old system via RCA, toslink or coax and you can:
- stream from a wide number of subscription services
- stream from your own DLNA server or samba share
- cast from Chromecast or AirPlay
- with multiple devices, you can do multi-room synchronized streaming
- apply parametric EQ, including (in the higher end models) auto room correction
- hook up a digital source (eg, TV) so you can apply EQ
- hook up an analog device (like a turntable) and stream it to the rest of the devices in the house
The app's surprisingly good, the firmware updated regularly.
The cheapest version is under $100. They're like Chromecast Audio's on steroids. When (eventually) they die or get superseded, it's easy to replace without needing to touch the rest of the system.
I have 3 at the moment, the main one hooked up my amp and speakers from the 80s, which I picked up used in the 2000s.
Well said. I have a Wiim Pro & Mini, and love them both. And it's the best way of minimising waste (given some waste is inevitable as standards change, until they let us change the board inside the Wiim or something!)
I've been really impressed by how they keep pushing features out to old devices. Like, there was no reason for them to give the Mini 10 band PEQ - they could have made people upgrade. But no, the working (seemingly quite hard) to get the performance out of the chip in the Mini to do it, and pushed the update out to everyone.
It feels like one of those low-sci-fi settings where we thought it'd be funny and quaint to have post-collapse scavengers endlessly repairing retro tech, but now it's actually happening and it's not funny anymore.
Like for example: My dad bought a hulking integrated Akai amp / cassette / turntable combo in the early 80s. Every user-facing component was brushed aluminum, the volume pot was the size of a Dallas church, and it probably would have killed any living organism you dropped it on.
My dad died over a decade ago and I guarantee that amp is still sitting in someone's living room heating the place up. I'm just mad it's not in mine.
Still enjoy my Elac speakers from 20+ years ago at an analog amp, a class D amp wouldn‘t be bad, though. For smaller speakers at computers I like active nearfield monitors and a good interface like Focusrite. Can recommend Genelec speakers, for example.
Yep, and this kind of needlessly wasteful consumerism is everywhere in the tech industry. All of the token statements about sustainability that come from the same industry that normalized and celebrates this kind of product strategy drives me a little crazy sometimes.
> A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
I have a rather nice NAD amplifier that I bought about 29 years ago. It had to be repaired once at about the 6 year mark. Recently, it has developed a new electronic failure mode that I don't believe can be repaired.
So ... yes, but let's not overdo the "never have to make another home audio purchase" part ...
I've been dabbling in Hifi for most of my life, a hobby inherited from my father. I have some awareness of consumer Hifi over the last 50 years.
Speaker and amplifier design are vastly better than even 15 years ago, partially because of better engineering and mostly because of advances in electronics. An entry level receiver today would wipe the floor with consumer level equipment from the 80s.
Still, traditional Hifi is dying to the "crap tiny speaker" folks. The company that owns Denon and Marantz may go out business this year.
It is ironic because traditional Hifi is in an amazing place in terms of value. I recently bought a budget (<$300) setup for my PC and I'm blown away by what a couple of modest bookshelf speakers, a modern mini-amp and a compact subwoofer can accomplish.
> The company that owns Denon and Marantz may go out business this year.
Oh man. I guess I better stock up on the latest Marantz before the go out of business. The last one I had was my dad's and it lasted 50 years. Actually, it still works, it just requires you to manually power it on.
> Speaker and amplifier design are vastly better than even 15 years ago
Let's break this down into the components:
Speaker drivers: very little change
Speaker chassis design: still changing, last major change was improved computational modeling
Amplifier: Class D was the last major change, not much since
DSP: Still evolving, getting better every day
AV Receiver control boards: Standards are changing every day, whether that's new HDMI standards, new bluetooth versions, or new AirPlay/Chromecast protocols.
Needing cables between a "streamer" box and my amp, and then cables from the amp to the speaker(s) already makes it a whole different category of gadget from Sonos. The key thing Sonos sells is the single power cable setup.
Wiim does sell an amp model that removes one of the steps. That's probably the one I'd go for if I accepted speaker cables. Less waste reduction BUT at least you don't have the separate amp volume knob and power switch to worry about.
> Still, traditional Hifi is dying to the "crap tiny speaker" folks.
I wonder if it also ties into living situations and customers that are in a separate house.
With my apartment-situation, I'm always using a headset (or bluetooth headphones.) Perhaps not crap tiny speakers, but not so big that making them good takes as much effort.
My desk setup is their AD-18 driving L/R bookshelf speakers and a compact subwoofer via its dedicated sub output. I love all the input options including traditional analog, toslink, BT/NFC, USB for high-res: https://www.smsl-audio.com/portal/product/detail/id/566.html
Except the industry is nearly dead. Almost nobody is buying legitimate stereo systems anymore, and the ones that are out there (at almost any price) are mind-bogglingly incompetent. I'm shocked that Sonos is even a going concern at this point, although I suppose it is because of what I relate below.
The home-audio market is consolidated into a tiny number of manufacturers masquerading under once-proud brands they bought. The crippling incompetence of the products themselves is depressing.
A few years ago my Denon A/V receiver crapped out and I decided to go "upmarket" and get an NAD T758. I accept a bit of quirkiness from a smaller name, but "quirkiness" doesn't come close to describing the design and functionality defects that plagued this thing. Everything from baffling menu navigation (not kidding: Pressing Enter did not select a menu entry; you were supposed to use an arrow key) to the fact that it would only pass 720p video because it reported erroneous EDID info to HDMI devices. It didn't pass the info from the connected display device; it just provided its own EDID blob to everything, which reported a max resolution of 720p.
The NAD also featured Dirac processing, which I shelled out for to get the full license and spent hours with a test mic profiling my room and speakers. Then... it would just lose the entire configuration. Deleted off the receiver. "We haven't been able to figure out why this happens," said NAD. In fact, in several years they never fixed a single one of the crippling defects I encountered and reported.
But NAD isn't the only shitshow in town. Let me address the biggest impediment to whole-home audio (or even multi-zone audio): manufacturers' bizarre conceit that anyone can use secondary zones that only play ANALOG sources. The NAD was crippled by this stupidity, as is the top-of-the-line Pioneer I bought to replace it.
In the case of the NAD, I addressed this defect by running RCA cables across the back of the receiver, from its preamp outputs to a CD-player input; and assigning that input to Zone 2. Why the hell didn't NAD just do that internally with a switch?
On the Pioneer, it's actually worse. There ARE no preamp outputs. It has THREE zones, one of which I can tie to the main one but the third, yep, can only play analog sources.
All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
BTW, I did build a patch bay with switches, to wire the secondary zone in parallel with the first... but this overloaded one pair of amps in the NAD and destroyed the entire receiver. Yep: NAD doesn't have a simple overload breaker. They just burn the entire amplifier board up; that's the breaker. Unfuckingbelievable.
But back to the main issue: Who is seriously going to dick around trying to select sources and adjust volume to each zone (with what, by the way, an app?) on one receiver instead of simply buying a bookshelf system for every remote room you want to play music in? I sure as shit wouldn't, and I'm the kind of person who ran digital cables under my house to an equipment closet so I could have a proper surround setup in my living room. I have a projector and home-built screen, but even I would never bother with the stupid usage scenario Pioneer, NAD, and the two other makers envision:
This scenario revolves around nonexistent people who are going to put on a RECORD or TAPE, then go to the other side of their house or down to their rec room for half an hour... and then come running back to the other side of the house to flip the record or tape over. WTF.
They should just fold. I read in some other forum that they just cobble together crap that they source from numerous and variable providers, so one unit's guts can vary widely from the next.
It's the absurd design defects that I will never excuse. I mean... incompetent MENUS? A modern receiver that doesn't support even HD video?
My burned-out T758 is gathering dust in my office; I'm keeping it in hopes of using the chassis for a project case someday.
I would replace my stupid Pioneer too if anyone made a stand-alone surround processor with preamp outputs. Then I'd get separate amplifiers and that would be that. But nobody makes such a processor, as far as I can tell.
Yes. The entire platform -- hardware & software -- is just a mess. I bought an MDC phono module for my digital amp only to discover it wasn't supported by its firmware. I waited 18 months to be able to actually use it. I experienced the same non-persistent configuration problem you described and also very sketchy things like the power button simply not working. Unacceptable by any measure and at any price point as far as I'm concerned.
Risking major flames here but .. my Sonos amps do this perfectly. Analog cable through the house, amps on eth in the media closet, it’s is very very solid.
Yeah, that's why I added the caveat at the top of my rant.
Too bad they messed up the app so badly. I've written some hardware-control applications and they're not necessarily easy, but... well, that's the job.
Meanwhile I've had my time stolen on numerous "ghost job" postings. Maybe someday, somewhere someone will take a lesson from Boeing and Sonos and other companies that have suffered from grossly incompetent software engineering and put a halt to the despicable disrespect for our time and knowledge.
> All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
Maybe a smart speaker switch like an Audioflow[0] is up your alley?
> The home-audio market is consolidated into a tiny number of manufacturers masquerading under once-proud brands they bought. The crippling incompetence of the products themselves is depressing.
There's quite a rise in Chinese HiFi companies that are making some great equipment. I've found audiosciencereview.com an excellent resource for getting back into hifi and avoiding much of the nonsense. I recently picked up a Fosi amp which, to me, functions at least as well as my NAD from the 80s. It cost me half of what I just spent on getting the NAD serviced.
> All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
Look into WiiM streamers. Cheap and quite impressive IME. Multi-room streaming from digital or analog sources, PEQ, room correction etc.
> All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS.
Actually that's what Denon's HEOS does, might want to take another look at their mid-level X1800H or the bigger ones if you need more zones from a single AVR instead of multiple devices.
I had a fancy separate stereo system with a HDMI switcher in the AV amp, well reviewed speakers I bought from a hi-fi enthusiast friend and all that.
It was a massive pain to put out all the cables, adjust the system manually little by little (the setup mic kinda helped, but wasn't that good).
Then I got a Sonos Beam and that set of "crap tiny speakers" with a fancy DSP brought so much more dimension to movies that it wasn't even funny. Upgraded to a Sub and it automatically offloaded those frequencies to it and the Beam got even better now that it didn't have to cosplay a subwoofer.
For setup all I had to do was walk around the space and wave my phone around and the difference was clearly audible even to my non-discerning ears.
Later I upgraded to an Arc + got two rears and everything got a lot better.
The v2 app is utter crap, I haven't had to use it for anything else than Trueplay adjustment when we moved a while ago. The v1 let me debug what the soundbar was receiving (my TV was sending data in the wrong format and I was just getting fancy stereo instead of Dolby Atmos). V2 doesn't have any power user features at all.
I'm not going back to a wired setup with a separate amp unless I get a dedicated theater room I can sound proof and manage the acoustics. I _am_ considering switching to a brand that doesn't need an app to setup, but it's slim pickings in the upper tier of soundbars.
Similar to you I had lugged my 7.1 speakers and amp and wires around to every address I’ve had in 20 years. For the current house I had enough and put a HomePod in every room and top tier Samsung bar + satellites + sub. It’s not as good at dimensions as discrete speakers but now I have reflected Atmos
Waves off the ceiling and setup was super easy. I had to use the app one time to calibrate but I already had it since I have a Washing machine it connects to.
The DSPs in sound bars are absolute marvels. I haven't checked the AV amp market in a good half decade, but I'm guessing there aren't any valid options if you want 4k 120Hz + room correcting DSP that are even close to the price of a mid/high end sound bar.
I never had a “proper” HT setup; my first was an Arc + Sub. I thought it was pretty great, and then I added two Era 300s for rears. My god.
I’m sure things can get better, but I’m pretty happy with my setup as-is. I’d probably splurge on an OLED TV first. I have an 85” Sony X91J that I quite like, but I can’t deny the absolute inky blacks of OLED (just couldn’t justify the price at the time at that size).
Sound might be solved, but multi-room audio is not. On major renovations you could layout speaker cables, but then you can't adjust positions.
Custom solutions with, like, snapcast and raspberries (like mine), works and you don't need to deal with any of this, but then you need to deal with software setup annoyances. It get's technical.
First of all "Even Apple" implies Apple is particularly bad, in fact it is one of the better ones in supporting older usecases and devices. But even then x86 to Apple silicon is not the roughest by far.
For me, it is the removal of x86-32 bit software support. The removal wasn't needed at all and broke all the steam games.
I assumed it was part of the migration plan to Apple silicon. Rosetta 2 makes x86 apps work on Apple silicon, but I had assumed that Apple could only really get 64-bit x86 apps working smoothly and that’s why they removed 32-bit support a few years earlier.
Rosetta supports 32 bit apps. I've read conjecture on here that the removal of 32 bit was due to unresolvable pointer security issues on their 32 bit SDK, which was different than how its done with their 64 bit system.
I mean, the week the iPhone X came out, they put out an irreversible update for the iPhone 7 that made it unusable. They also tried to charge me 2,300$ to fix just one broken keyboard key. Apple is definitely that bad.
It never happened. I used a 6 and a 6S Plus, fully updated, for many years after my I got my wife an XS. Not that it proves nothing happened to the 7 the year before the XS came out, but,
A) it would have been huge news if Apple bricked all iPhone 7, and
B) it makes no sense to brick iPhone 7, but not the ones before it.
People will think what you’re saying is hyperbole; however, I was on a walk with the family, and I saw a Sonos speaker in the trash. It looked like new and a fairly recent model. I lugged it home, and it was a $US500 Sonos Play:5 speaker system [1].
Once home, I plugged it in, and it powered up.
I tried to pair it with my iPhone using the new Sonos app, and it didn’t work (the app never found the speaker).
I then tried the same again using my development Android device, and it instantly worked!
Once it was set up with the Android app, I could access it via the iPhone version of the app.
I can only imagine some iPhone owner literally threw it in the trash because he couldn’t get the iOS app to work. Bonkers…
They (Sonos) basically willfully attempted to brick their consumer devices, and since many sonos customers were prosumer enthusiasts but not technical (hw or sw) it really did signal EOL for the products. Bananas. I still have a my Play1/3/5 infrastructure operating through Home Assistant and AirBridge that turns them into Airplay devices. It's not perfect but still gives them utility. Considering how much they f'n cost..
I have some old Sonos speakers that have been gathering dust for a while.
I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.
However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.
And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.
Have a look at these:
bluesound, audiopro, bang-olufsen, denon.
Depending on which software is in use for streaming operations, you could also use ‘standard’ WiFi-enabled speakers like something from KEF (LS50) or
dynaudio.
Just from top of my head. Maybe someone else has a comprehensive liste at hand.
Soundboks 4 sync wirelessly with each other. They’re also battery driven and absurdly loud, so perfect for bringing outdoors or a dance party somewhere.
They just had a 30% sale for the holidays though, so might not be worth getting them at full price
I am very annoyed at the planned obsolescence that Sonos has been pushing for a while now. I stopped buying new Sonos hardware, I'm still using all my old hardware, just not with the terrible Sonos apps, but with Roon.
I also took to aggressively repairing very old hardware that was actually failing (ZP80 players), because of the Sonos planned obsolescence policy. Recapping the PSU did the job, and I intend to keep them going for as long as I possibly can.
I guess it depends on what you're looking for. I would also like to get everything FREE FREE FREE, but I've grown tired of using software and services whose goals are not aligned with mine. I don't want ads, progressive ensh*ttification, and all the other crap. So I'm paying the $149/year for Roon, and I have perfect lossless (FLAC) audio playback on all of my devices, along with good library management and fantastic liner notes for Jazz.
As a fringe benefit, it lets me use all of my old Sonos devices (as well as a modern Denon). And lets me listen to my FLAC music in a reasonably decent phone app as well.
In other words, I think the value proposition is sound. Importantly, their goals are aligned with mine: I want to listen to music and I pay them to maintain software that lets me listen to music. They want to get paid, so they maintain software that lets me listen to music. This is a very different relationship than most.
Funnily enough I bought a Sub Mini last year and had to borrow an iPad to add it to my system because it failed on Android, even when being walked through the process by someone from Sonos support.
Be thankful Sonos no longer have 'recycle mode' - an antifeature which gave customers a discount in exchange for permanently bricking their old Sonos hardware. They were forced to discontinue the practice after backlash.
> Sonos has a good reputation for building quality speakers, but its latest move has disappointed some buyers. Recently, the company offered a trade-up program, giving legacy customers 30 percent off the latest One, Beam or Port. In exchange, buyers just had to "recycle" their existing products. However, what Sonos meant by "recycle" was to activate a feature called "Recycle Mode" that permanently bricks the speaker. It then becomes impossible for recycling firms to resell it or do anything else but strip it for parts.
> Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same.
Usually yeah. Though it sure appears that a lot of apps requiring a recent iOS lately don't need too. It's curious where that push is coming from, if they're all individual company choices, made at once, for the first time ever.
It’s relatively easy to justify supporting only one or two major versions back if you’re writing an iOS app. There are stats out there on how many active devices are on what version, it’s pretty striking. Especially compared to Android.
Agreed of course. Though currently iOS 16 is the standard and that goes back about 2.5 years. Which is sort of a shift from many major apps supporting an iOS dating back 4-5 years.
Where are you getting these numbers from? Do you have stats to back them up? When I worked as an app developer we would only support back 2 or 3 versions, and that was 5 years ago. Anecdotally I have not noticed a shift to only supporting more recent OSes.
I dunno, I ran my mid-2012 MBP until ~October 2021. In that time, I got it serviced once for a screen issue that they fixed under some program (after the warranty period). I think it got security patches as recently as then. That seemed like a solid run to me.
The last new OS that a mid-2012 MBP received was High Sierra, in 2017. That was the OS that added warnings about the impending breakage of all existing 32-bit apps (!), you may recall.
My own MBP from the same era as yours succumbed to a logic board long before then, and I replaced it with a late 2016 MBP, which came with a touch bar + butterfly keyboard, had terrible performance, stopped receiving updates after Monterey (2021), no longer receives security updates, and (obviously) can't run modern ARM-based Mac software. (Incidentally, it was also the single most expensive computer I ever bought, even to date!) Not a very solid run, I'd say.
Personal anecdotes aside, I don't think it's too disputable that Mac has never taken backwards compatibility or computer longevity anywhere as seriously as Windows or Linux have.
I had the Retina, which went up to Catalina (which is the last major OS mine had), but it also got security patches up until 2022. I upgraded to the M1 MBP when they were released, but last I tried, my old MBP still booted up.
Ah, yeah, I do recall the horror stories about the butterfly keyboard ones. Sorry to hear it. I was able to skip that entire generation because mine ran like a champ.
> Personal anecdotes aside, I don't think it's too disputable that Mac has never taken backwards compatibility or computer longevity anywhere as seriously as Windows or Linux have.
I think this is probably true. Unfortunately, the reason I moved to MacBook's in the first place was because I had a terrible run of Windows PCs & laptops. I think I had 4 or so between 2002 and 2012, but only 1 between 2012 and 2021. I suppose that's why I'm partial to Macs.
I hear you! You had a great device through some of the best years of OS X. I wasn't as lucky, but that was a big impetus for eventually pushing me to Linux, where I'm very content with my combo of a Mac-ish DE and actually being in control of my device.
> Other OS providers do support the devices longer. At least for core OS updates.
Microsoft is abandoning 63% of its user base later this year, with an untold amount of those users unable to update to Windows 11 due to the requirements of a processor released after 2017. Keep in mind that with how the average Windows user buys their device, it's common to see brand new computers with two years old CPUs. With the pandemic having forced everyone to scrape the bottom of the barrel for laptops, there are so many people getting bitten by Microsoft right now.
It boggles my mind that I'm not able to download the oldest released version of software that was compatible with my old version of iOS.
My iPad is too old to upgrade to the new OS, but yet no software is available for it in the store, because all new apps are encouraged to be re-released for the newest version of the OS.
My device is completely frozen in time from whatever software was installed on it when it went out of support.
I have an old iphone somewhere and I also experienced this frustration. I appreciate you're not compatible with my ios - so give me the one that was. I don't care about whatever features you've added
However, I do suspect app developers don't want to be on the hook for supporting old versions, should they continue to serve things in need of security fixes etc etc. I don't entirely attribute it to malice.
Thanks for the link! I wasn't aware of some of these workarounds.
Your link is very helpful, but also notes some of the limitations. Namely, this doesn't work if the software has been purged due to not being updated recently, and it doesn't really work to find new-to-me software (that I haven't purchased previously).
Even if it's technically possible to reinstall software that I've previously purchased, it is very limited in its ability to install new-to-me software.
Why is apple always brought up even though they have nothing to do with the topic on hand, and speakers and iphones/laptops are obviously quite different products?
There's a bunch of stuff built around the old Logitech media server system, with open source implementations running on esp32 and raspberry pi, as well as a slew of other devices
2 out of 3 of my Sonos devices were rendered useless by their policies. One day they were functional and working, and the next day they were not. One of these was a fancy, very expensive jog-wheel remote that I rather liked (every one of these in use all got absolutely bricked, deliberately, in a bullshit move), and the other was a Sonos Bridge (a wireless access point) that they didn't deem worthy of working with new software (even though that was also bullshit).
The remaining device has mechanical issues (as old speakers sometimes do). This one is disappointing, but at least it isn't irrational.
we moved into a home that had wired speakers installed in every room all to a central Sonos enabled device - it is all old. It worked perfectly until this.
Funny thing is, we thought it was silly when we moved in - then we grew to love it. Now I hate them!
I have two Play 5's that I have had for a decade and they're still currently set up working completely fine on an Apple device. That's a speaker that was released 16 years ago and still works through the Sonos app, still allows me to play Spotify, still works natively with the Playbar to watch movies and TV.
That sounds pretty good to me. If people want to throw out their hardware and buy new that's fine, but they haven't needed to throw out their Play 5's.
If I was still using an Apple iPhone from 2009 you can bet it would be a terrible experience
There was a time when Sonos really tried to EOL "Gen 1" devices, including the Play 5. There was such a backlash that they backpedaled a bit, but Gen 1 devices lost the ability to interact with Gen 2 and later devices and you need to use a different app for them.
I'm a Sonos hater. I will never ever buy a speaker again that comes pre-bricked unless you "activate it".
I will never ever buy a speaker again that demands I enable precise location in order to "discover" the speaker on my network. Approximate location is not enough. Sonos demands your home address before it permits you to use your speaker. Even aux line-in.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that requires I log-in before I can set certain things unrelated to online use, such as the volume limiter.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that has an obscene amount of delay even when using the aux line-in. And yes I toggled the setting in the app to "reduce delay" and followed all the steps to reduce the delay as much as possible, but the delay was still there. Forget about using a Play5 gen2 for home theatre or anywhere you need low-latency. Rant over!
Requiring "precise location" is probably necessary because it wants to use Bluetooth to discover speakers.
Any app that uses direct bluetooth could theoretically get your precise location from a Bluetooth geotag, so Apple requires apps to get "precise location" permission before being allowed to use bluetooth.
I checked the docs, and you are right, I mixed something up. Bluetooth does not need "precise location". Bluetooth has its own permission dialog since iOS 13.
I confused it with the "Access Wi-Fi Information Entitlement". If an app wants to scan for nearby Wifi networks, it needs the "precise location" permission [1], because the names of Wifi networks can be used to determine precise location.
Maybe the Sonos app wants to scan for Wifi networks?
Sonos speakers set up their own WiFi network that's used to configure them before they join the final network, doing that probably requires "Access Wi-Fi Information Entitlement".
I guess that's why they ask to move the speaker "close to the router" when setting up.
Honestly, if they had a checkbox saying "do not share my location with Sonos" it would have eased my anxiety. But they don't, they default everything to "we collect data".
Relying on an unread "privacy policy" as the pinky swear for protecting the data they force users to give up, is bad privacy. You can't even delete your own Sonos account, the "delete account" button doesn't actually perform that function.
This is the answer for one of the arguments as to why Sonos needs precise location. It needs to scan for WiFi networks because they connect to your WiFi network and Apple to do that requires precise location.
But it won't matter saying that because some people refuse to believe that some companies genuinely need to use that.
But they don't need to [use location services]. I only wanted the 3.5mm line in on the Sonos Play5, but was denied unless I jumped through their app "onboarding" routine.
It's essentially a loudspeaker with 3.5mm input. But you must complete the mandatory Sonos induction dance before the input signal is permitted the path to output. Like I said, never again.
It's a shame because I quite liked the sound of the Play5. It's bright, but the wide dispersion is good for certain types of listening at low to medium volume.
Then I think you may have misread the product line for Sonos and perhaps the core product just isn't for you. Sonos is about wireless speakers that can connect with other speakers in your home and can be controlled over your WiFi network, that is the heart of Sonos. Heck the Play 5 is called "Our most powerful wireless Hi-Fi speaker".
Line in is an additional component of the speaker however the entire ethos is controlling the speaker over WiFi by anyone in the home.
> It's less the app, more the business decision to tell people who had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on elaborate sound systems to go throw it all in the trash and start over, all at once.
As a Sonos purchaser, ironically product longevity was the reason I bought so much of their stuff!
While other similar systems would drop support for old devices eventually, I could be confident with Sonos that I was investing in stuff that would continue to work.
… until now! I’ve started to lose confidence. Which is a shame - I’m moving into a new house and wanting a sub, but now questioning if that’s a sensible decision given I don’t know how long my older speakers will work for now they are going glitchy. Real shame!
> It's less the app, more the business decision to tell people who had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on elaborate sound systems to go throw it all in the trash and start over, all at once.
What does this refer to? Did Sonos drop support for products? When was this, which products?
I like to reverse decisions further back. The connected speaker is basically a commodity at this point. Sonos does have some nice features, but they are very expensive. I think the ceo saw the down sales and lack of new products and rushed out the app hoping it would work and boost sales. Obviously it was a disaster, but I’m not sure if sticking to the status quo would have led to any different outcome in sales.
> They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
Catalina literally just dumped half the software that ever ran on MacOS overnight to make the transition to Apple Silicon seem smoother than it actually was.
The app update they're talking about is the one that got released last year which is terrible, it keeps crashing, doesn't work with time zone and a bunch of other stuff
I can vouch for this, as I have a pile Sonos "bricks" that _used_ to be components of a costly yet functional sound system. Won't touch anything Sonos with a 10ft pole.
Yeah, I believe the firmware on all compatible devices was auto-updated to the new architecture and apparently they can't go back to the old firmware for some reason. What a mess.
It's the story of good hardware but bad software all over again.
I always wondered why except for Apple nobody gets this right. I know, it's somewhat totally different, but man, it surely can't be that hard (especially not effing 30 million bucks hard).
Luckily I only use my Sonos IKEA lamp only with Air Play, but the few times I have to use their app? Bonkers. Absolutely trash.
Bugs for systems with piss poor documentation, testing, and build infrastructure. If you've done even a halfway decent job in those three categories, then it's very hard to have such expensive system maintenance/sustainment activities unless it's a very large system.
My Sonos app experience is probably the worst of any smart devices I’ve owned. Dropped connections, unable to connect or stream, just all-around inconsistencies. Great speaker when it’s hardwired but the “smart” app is bad. Why did it take years for the chickens to come home to roost?
Well, it didn’t used to be bad. OG Sonos was awesome. If the ceo kept leading investors on with “just one more quarter/we are almost ready to launch the big fixes/etc” then I can understand why it took so long. AFAIK this is the first ceo that Sonos has ever ousted so I think it’s a pretty big deal.
Hoping the new one will have more foresight to not screw over existing customers in the face of the new shiny.
In other news, I hear Framework is looking to get into other hardware niches… if they ever made a networked speaker, I’d buy it.
FWIW there are several third-party mobile applications that work just fine to operate Sonos equipment.
The speakers expose a few SOAP-based APIs to any clients on the LAN. Those allow for track control, grouping, etc. They don't allow adding new music services, but they can do the vast majority of daily interaction. These APIs continue to work nearly flawlessly even for my Play:1 devices that are 10 years old.
Streaming via AirPlay is indeed hit-or-miss, but it hasn't gotten worse in the past couple years.
I control my Sonos from a jQuery-based web application I wrote nearly 10 years ago that runs on a raspberry pi in my closet. I have not had to change anything in several years, and I use my 15+device Sonos system all the time.
The new app is indeed a dumpster fire. Somehow the company managed to make their first-party application worse than any of the third-party applications.
I've been using Sonophone on iOS since all this kicked off. Not great, but it works. (For me Sonos breaking NAS media server support was killer, and Sonophone can handle it).
Had this not happened sledgehammers would have been going through speakers.
I would still prefer they rolled back to the old app, or made it as an optional re-release.
Thanks for your recommendation! With Sonophone, my group of one Sonos Outside + 2 old Play:3 speakers now reacts almost instantly instead of waiting minutes for that group to be ready to be controlled. Awesome.
Wow I had no idea you could actually “downgrade” things to be compatible with S1. (My units all came with the later app that force updated itself, but appear to be compatible with S1). They had given me the idea the device firmware was ratcheting forward, so once upgraded no way back.
Did this change during all the noise? (Entirely possible I was oblivious)
If you run Home Assistant already, there are some good Sonos solutions in there.
The actual Sonos integration still works (IIRC) with most of my speakers, in that I can use them as targets in automations involving audio (sees them on network and integrates directly).
The AirSonos add-in makes the Gen1 devices show up on your network as AirPlay targets. IME, AirSonos can be a little buggy since you're going through a bridge but not enough to really matter. It's functional value far exceeds the frustration (90% of the time it works 100% of the time).
With all this, you might be stuck with the old room names set when you had access to the Sonos native app. I think AirSonos lets me mask those names, but every now and then I have to remember that, oh yeah, the Play3 labeled Kitchen is actually now actually bedroomxyz. But again, it works for all intents and purposes. I can airplay from sonos, audible, etc to my gen1 sonos equipment, and that's waaaay better than tossing them into a chinese river (recycling) or a local landfill.
The EEVBlog video about the "Fronos" project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70) involved embedding a new amp with bluetooth into the Play:5 chasis, and there are certainly amps these days you could consider that have built-in airplay. Something for the project queue. For me, using the above with Home Assistant keeps this project at the bottom of the queue, though it's probably the "right" solution long term.
I wonder how much of that is Sonos sucking vs bluetooth just being an absolutely terrible connection protocol. it's always a raindance prayer that bluetooth will work, even harder to have it pair. bluetooth makes printers seem like NASA level quality software.
Most of my Sonos speakers and soundbars worked before the app update and right after, all that became unreliable, across devices.
I’d say that leads me to believe it’s an app issue versus just Bluetooth. Agree that BT by itself has a reputation to match, but in this case Sonos is to blame. The other apps recommended in the post work well.
>Why did it take years for the chickens to come home to roost?
because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar, it's some of the best sound quality you can find for home audio, and it doesn't require a month of product research to figure it out. it's easily available in most big-box stores, and unlike some other brands they don't have a shit-tier line of products that look indistinguishable from their good stuff so you have to be cautious as a consumer to buy only the good stuff. if you go to best buy and spend $500 on sonos products, you're going to get your moneys worth.
it's too bad their app sucks, because their hardware doesn't.
I dont think this is true. I am no audiophile but Sonos is actually quite expensive vs getting some streamer like Wiim with basic cheap amp and any solid speaker brand - KEF, Elac, Klipsh, Polk…
I know its some choices but any of them are good choice its mostly flavours. What you get for same money will sound better and 100% last longer because you have modular system instead of glued box that stops working when Sonos stops caring about the product (like they did before).
yeah, so you've gone from walking in to a store and coming out with a single box that you can plug in to power and connect to wifi and get music on, to decision on what amp to buy, and a decision on which of the hundred nearly identical bookshelf speakers to get, a question on whether your amp will drive those speakers. and then you've got to find a store to actually sell you all that stuff. it's an entirely different market from what sonos is providing to customers.
fwiw i did exactly what you're suggesting for my personal use, i've got a wiim pro and a fosi v3 and kanto 5" speakers and i'm very happy with my setup. but i'm a nerd who likes shopping for things like that, and i know enough to know that most people would rather not. and it's not like i saved anything compared to going with a sonos.
edit: and, as i just learned a little further down the thread, you've also got to be careful which model of wiim you buy - the newest and nicest ones don't have airplay.
> because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar
They were really expensive, but people confused quality (why else would it cost so much) with convenience and were happy not knowing about anything else.
It's a good strategy, works well for other companies. But when you remove the convenience part of it everything else falls apart too.
So now choice is a bad thing? Let people have their Sonoses. The thing with audio gear is that if you get any of the recommended (youtube, reddit) cheap stuff and you are not audiophile level hobbiist you will like it.
I would not say you didnt get anything back. You got setup where at minimum the speakers will work for decades.
Afaik WiiM ultra doesnt have Airplay yet as is new it needs certification. I believe this was the case with other their devices.
People who pay for WiiM ultra most likely dont care about Airplay anyway because Airplay 2 devices send lossy AAC 256kbps audio. You dont get streamer for 329usd to send reencoded music there. You get it so it streams from the original sources directly.
official word from wiim is that the ultra will never have airplay
the reason airplay matters so much is that even if you want great audio quality and care about the bitrate of your music, other people in your house don't and just want to make music come out of the speakers. no airplay resigns the device to "nobody else can use it" status.
> I am no audiophile but Sonos is actually quite expensive vs getting some streamer like Wiim with basic cheap amp and any solid speaker brand - KEF, Elac, Klipsh, Polk…
The whole point is Sonos is easy. One product for speakers. Another one for a sub (which most people don't even need). Ok now you're done. And then there's people who really don't have space for all that.
KEF LS50 Wireless IIs and Dutch & Dutch 8cs are just a couple example of how the hifi market has embraced embedded streamers. They are excellent options for high quality sound with very low setup.
You still miss the streamer. The speakers are active with bluetooth reciever but cant play music by themselves. I am not sure if then its not better to go sonos. Either go full modular or nothing. Active speakers are not popular exactly because its usually the amp that dies and then your speakers die with it.
Then again you can look for wiim mini packaged with active speakers - they have colab/packages like this. I recently got wiim+edifier [1] in sale for 130usd and its shockingly good combo for fraction of sonos (especially since its stereo).
Oh interesting. You are right i always thought they are not streamers and thats why i always dismissed idea of LS50 Wireless.
That makes it indeed a lot more interesting if you are $$$ and dont really care if they one day stop software support.
I bought recently Samsung HW-Q990D, generally better rated than similarly priced Sonos. Had a bit of mental resistance with the Samsung+audio pair, I am more a Sennheiser type of person.
Sound is fine, not hifi just a notch below, but good hifi surround is a 10k thingie. They cost 500-800 in Europe, much less than Sonos surround+sub solutions. No issues with connectivity, connect via eArc with TV without issues and starts with it, bluetooth with both Samsung and Apple OK too. Have some extra features when paired with Samsung TVs. One detail I love - extra bass control on remote, so I can move it down easily during late night watching (low frequencies travel better through walls).
I like them a lot and run Spotify from phone on them all the time.
We used Sonos at a place I used to work, and it was easily one of the worst tech experiences I've ever had. Constant issues. We had a 10-step troubleshooting guide that had to be referenced daily (until everyone had memorized the steps out of repetition), with a bonus (half-)joke step that was "dash it to the ground". Even during the infrequent and intermittent working periods, it was nothing special.
I've always been amazed at how different my experience apparently was to everyone else's, because I only ever see glowing praise (before the apparently disastrous new app rollout, which still sounds like a better experience than I had). I can only assume there were significant updates and improvements in the time since, because the company wouldn't have lasted a month if our experience was typical.
The app experience was bad for years even before this new app. The strange thing is when I was complaining then there were always defensive voices ready to deny any bad experience. I’m glad it’s finally come to light. Spent so much for Sonos.
No, on iOS Sonos requires actual location services, and precise must be turned on. Pairing a basic Bluetooth device does not require that. I went to Sonos tech support, escalated, and they confirmed you can't just bluetooth pair to activate the speakers. Once you've done that you can turn off the location services, but I feel like it's a blatant violation of my privacy. I returned $800 worth of speakers.
Iirc, this is because the network access required to control the speakers could be used to determine your location. So it is really the OS that is letting you know what you’re risking, not the app requesting too much.
I hate these stupid ‘smart’ devices. Personally, I just have some decent quality speakers hooked up to an good quality old school amp with an AirPort Express feeding into the line in.
I do this with WiiM. For me, the biggest thing is that I have speakers that are >20 years old that still work perfectly. Why replace what already works well?
I looked at the Sonos ecosystem for this, but their non-speaker devices are absurdly priced. The network audio streamer is 449 and the amp is 699. WiiM amps are either 299 or 379 and their network streamer ranges from 149 to 329. I have a few of the network streamers which were 149. They connect into my receiver, into an old amp I have, etc. and work perfectly.
Same. Denon receiver, some capable speakers, and Airport Express for Airplay (which I would love to replace for something with a bit less connection delay - come on, Apple)! Only the last part is dependent on a modern stack ,the first two will last decades.
I, like an idiot, sold my Onkyo Integra amplifier, radio tuner, tape deck, Canton and KEF speakers for next to nothing and switched to Sonos. I deeply regret it. In my kitchen, there’s an old Grundig radio and a Sonos speaker. Guess which one gets turned on in the morning and evening during meals?
Canton speakers are legendary, I wish I had the money back then. A good friend of mine still has his and won‘t give them away for any new smart speaker.
I’m old so maybe that’s why I never understood the Sonos fascination. Sonos was also crazy expensive for what it was. Around covid I sold my almost 20 year old floor standing Paradigms and bought some KEFs because I needed something smaller. I glanced at Sonos, but thought no way do those sound as good or last 20 years.
Speakers with decent sound (sure, your separates system is going to sound better, but pretty decent).
They have some really fancy wireless mesh tech in an era where that's unheard of. They pick up your local music collection and have a controller application on most OS's that allows you to build stereo pairs or tv surround systems wirelessly, arbitrarily group together rooms in your house, stream music from wherever to wherever and generally just have music in the places you want it with little hassle. I still have some Sonos play:1 speakers I got in 2012 that are going strong, even though they live mostly outdoors now.
Now, if those aren't your use-cases, and you really do care about high fidelity sound (I don't), then it's probably not for you. But it has been great for me and I've built up quite a lot of speakers.
Unfortunately (and here's the subject of TFA) - in the middle of last year they screwed the pooch, and half the time their app doesn't even load any more :/
TIL. I am actually considering moving to Sonos and this got me rethinking. Sonos is what came up as the reliable option for wireless speaker systems. I am not an audiophile and so don't care too much about fidelity. Ease of use is the main functionality for me, and Sonos came up as the best option. I will wait for a bit to see how things pan out before deciding.
I've owned Sonos for 10+ years, and I would not consider their products easy to use. They cater to a very specific use case (homeowners with distinct closed door spaces, 100% investment in their ecosystem, low interop outside of the ecosystem including with other Music streaming systems) and if you fit that narrow mold, you will have a great time. But if you don't, you will find yourself with a lot of overpriced equipment for what it is.
In the 10 years I've owned them, I've used the app less than 10 total times. I much rather prefer just using them as an over priced surround system and use my Playstation to play music through the TV/sonos.
I suspect that mold is not as narrow as you think. I bought most of my Sonos setup over a decade ago and it's still going strong because I never upgraded from the S1 app. It's the newer S2 app that has been horrendous.
I would not buy or recommend new Sonos products now. Occasionally I do think about adding to my setup but since the update debacle that's no longer an option. Over the years my Sonos has been pretty reliable, and very importantly, the wife and kids can use it easily. We just want "Play X in Room Y." It works very well for that. Even my nerdy self is OK with that... I have plenty of other things to nerd/worry about and I just want my music to play.
I did have a period of instability after I moved some Sonos speakers around, and I must say their tech support was pretty good (this was maybe four years ago). They looked at my logs and told me it was a weak signal issue, which I thought was ridiculous and initially dismissed... but after digging some more and troubleshooting my home signals, it turns out they were right.
Old Sonos with old S1 app is still great for me! It really pains me to see how far they have fallen.
I was an S1 app user as well, I've never even used or heard of S2 until the recent drama. I think it's worth highlighting that "Play X in Room Y" mandates defined rooms, and if you are in any kind of living situation in which this is not the case, Sonos is not right for you.
As a long time apartment/condo dweller, Sonos basically can't do what I'm looking for.
I've never owned Sonos, but I have owned and researched a lot of wireless routers and generally active on their forums. Across them all, it seems like tons of topics of people constantly complaining about Sonos connectivity and blaming the routers.
I don't know what makes them different, or if they are just that popular that I'm seeing the noise, but it's something that I'd personally dig into more before investing.
I wouldn't recommend either. I bought into the ecosystem around 10 years ago because I had just gotten my first real job and wanted to treat myself to some nice stuff. I got the Play:5 and then the sound bar and subwoofer soon after.
Then, like two years later, everything I bought became 2nd class citizens. I have use Legacy apps that are just barely working. It sucks.
It was super cool when it all worked but if it took them this long to get rid of that CEO, then I don't seem them turning around at any point soon.
I'm a big fan of WiiM for a more affordable alternative (for some). I'm not an audiophile, but have a handful of passive speakers around the house and I hook up a wiim amp or a wiim 'streamer' (forget the name) to my existing amp/receiver setup. Works great for me. WHA works well, although I never use it.
For me, the major thing that matters is that I can see a device in spotifys device list and can play to that device. Similarly, it needs to be zero setup for anyone else on my wifi network (wife, kids, friends). WiiM covers that perfectly.
Granted, there is some work there if you don't already have speakers. I personally think Spotify is a great product. I just don't want my speakers running an operating system. I have speakers as old as 25 years that work perfectly with the WiiM. No point in adding additional tech in a speaker that works perfectly as-is. My biggest worry (which Spotify has been pretty good about) is that the speakers work over WiFi and at some point, will be sunsetted. Maybe not within the next few years, but I don't have much faith that a Sonos system will work well in 10-15 years.
This is exactly my setup. I have a multi room setup and want to control them with an app. Looks like Wim is something I should look at. Thanks for the suggestion
I’ve been using Kef LSX II and their KC62 Sub for the past year and I love the sound and convenience. Sonos came up as a frequent alternative, but I preferred the look and sound of the Kefs.
I only have them in one room, so I can’t comment on multi-room audio.
I have a Sonos system at home, have for years. (I currently have to use the "Sonos S1" app because I have one older device that is not supported by the new app.) It sounds good (to me) when everything is working, but honestly the reliability has never been that great. After first buying it, I eventually learned that you really want to buy one of their 'hubs' (the one I have is the Sonos Boost) and have that plugged into your wired ethernet network. Otherwise, at least in my hands, things just don't work very reliably. (You can also, I am told, plug a single speaker into your wired network and achieve much the same effect, but for reasons it was easier for me to buy the Boost.) But even now when you select a new song/album/playlist, it seems to take a weirdly long time for it to start playing and have the album art show up on the phone, and sometimes it just fails and you have to try again (the 2nd time almost always works, FWIW). But it is really nice to have decent-sounding on-demand music throughout your home at the touch of a (few) button(s). I hear that bluOS and HEOS are decent alternatives, but they don't seem to be as popular as Sonos, and I've never seen a convincing demonstration that they would work better for me. And of cource there's the lock-in factor: Replacing all my Sonos equipment would be pricey at this point. I used to get really mad about lack of cross-manufacturer interop when I was younger and poorer, but nowadays I'm willing to stomach it if it means that stuff just works. But it's continually irksome that equipment at these prices isn't 100% glitch-free.
For a use like you describe, I'm currently accomplishing that with a mix of various Google/Nest speakers & screens throughout the house, arranged into a few different groups. What would make Sonos a better option?
I got a bluOS device just as a networked amped for my 25 year old speakers. But honestly its too much of a hassle to switch inputs. The price wasnt too bad, but I basically use it as a dumb amp with digital audio input from the tv. At least the amp fits under my tv.
I've got the Arc soundbar and subwoofer one year ago to save space by replacing my more typical 3.1 setup with receiver, sub, and bookshelf speakers.
I'm happy with the form factor, audio quality, and overall TV experience, and I honestly haven't used the app enough to even notice if there was a big update.
That said, I haven't used any Sonos multi-room functionality. But I have noticed weird gaps in functionality with the Arc's Amazon Alexa integration. The Arc doesn't support moving audio to it from other Alexa speakers, or vice versa. I have to imagine they deliberately disabled this, as if I'm going to replace all my Alexa devices just to get Sonos multi-room audio working!
All this negative feedback had me second-guessing as well. But I took the plunge this month and I’ve been very happy tbh. Setup was flawless and I haven’t run into any issues since purchase.
But my setup is just Beam + Ikea Symfonisk for surrounds. Planning to add the sub mini later on.
My guess is the issues start to occur the bigger your setup and if you heavily use the app? I havent touched the app since setting it up.
I don't know if it's related to the size of the setup, but (quick calculation...) I have 8 zones, seven with individual speakers and one of them is a Beam+Symfonisk Frame+sub surround thing.
We're on starlink, which is great but adds some latency to some stuff, and the new app has been terrible - barely loads, claims to start playing but nothing happens, volume adjustments take random amounts of time or may be ignore, all sorts.
But also when not using the app (just watching tv) the surround system is still pretty perfect.
Sonos has been great for me for 12 years. The newer products also showed up as airplay targets, which made things even easier. You can do fun stuff like group one that target with other systems to stream the audio around, or group another room (say the kitchen) with the tv so you can keep listening to your show while you move between rooms.
But the app they released last year is an unreliable clusterfuck, and while you don't need the app for things like tv audio, if you want to stick an album on in your shed while you do some carpentry (one of my use-cases recently) then you're probably going to want to use it. And right now that's very hit or miss.
So I think a little bit of wait and see is probably the right choice. If they get good again and drop the moronic everything-goes-through-our-cloud approach, I'd have no hesitation in recommending them again.
Glad to be using the Sonos speakers as just AirPlay 2 speakers. No issues, no app to deal with (never even opened them past setup), perfectly synchronized with non-Sonos AirPlay speakers as well.
"Perfectly synchronized?" I airplay to 6 sonos speakers using airplay2 (not grouping in the app) multiple times a day, and I can practically predict what will happen if I try to add speakers too quickly, or too slowly. You'll add 2, then a 3rd, then you'll notice one isn't actually playing, and when you add the 4th, all the rest drop out, and you get to re-add them again. It's such a chore to keep a multi-speaker airplay setup working right.
A lot of this could be solved if Apple put some basic engineering effort into the airplay UI, such as adding aliased groups. Every time I want to play to my effing speakers it's a 60 second ordeal.
Sometimes the little banner pops up from the top of the screen helpfully letting me to play to all of the speakers like I was before. Other times it not-so-helpfully suggests just playing to ONE speaker for some incomprehensible reason.
Still other times, the banner covers what I'm trying to see, and swiping it away seems to activate airplay even when I don't want to.
Unfortunate that's your experience. Personally, at least with my 3-4 speaker setup (multiple Sonos and 2nd gen AirPort Express feeding non-Sonos speakers), I've never really had issues (maybe out of sync once or twice a year). Your mileage may vary I guess.
The app is so bad that I'm about chuck three Sonos Ones in the trash (metaphorically) and replace them with HomePod Minis or whatever—and I would certainly never go back to Sonos products after that. Huge failure. The CEO should've been dumped months ago.
Maybe just get separate speakers and streamer like WiiM. You wont regret it if the streamer dies you will still have speakers and just replace the streamer.
This is the route I took. I did not want to get involved in the sonos ecosystem even though most people were telling me sonos was "so easy" to setup. My setup... passive speakers, an amp and a wiim streamer and I can swap out any of the pieces with any nother from another manufacturer at any time if I want.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadI wanted to start some music playing via Sonos in another room for my dogs earlier while I was on a call.
It took nearly two minutes for the app to update and be able to select my "calming cello music for dogs" playlist.
Their favourite is Jaap Ter Linden’s recording of Bach’s Cello Suites, I think because it’s a little richer sounding than Yo-Yo Ma.
I read somewhere that dogs love cello music because it has the same tones as the human voice, and it certainly seems to calm them more than any other music.
I was really excited for the app update because the old app was really unstable. Then the update happened and it was like 10x worse than the old app. Then in the past few months it's gotten really solid (for me anyway) and I'm pretty happy with it.
> Spence, in October, had acknowledged mistakes surrounding the app's release and said that he and seven other company leaders would forgo their bonuses.
People out of a job because of you and you're gonna forgo your bonuses.
> Spence, whose total compensation was $5.19 million in fiscal 2023, took a roughly $72,000 cash bonus.
Well, the board seems to have fired him too?
Remember, though, conveniently, according to other executives, there's "only a limited number of people with the skills to be CEOs! So we have to pay them so much!"
I had checked the compatibility lists and found that one of my older sonos devices wouldnt be supported. But I accepted that as I really wanted to get a new Sonos Sub 4 (S2-only) to connect with my existing Sonos Playbar (which supports updating to S2).
The upgrade process was bad, had to restart and reset devices a couple of times.. but after a while I got all my existing Sonos devices onto S2.
When I added the Sub to the system, the app told me that I couldnt pair it with the playbar. The app adviced me to get one of the newer Sonos soundbars..
I'm very disappointed that they did this.. I fully understand that some devices dont work with a new protocol, but after consulting the compatibility list I expected my Sonos Playbar would be able to pair with all other S2 devices.. what is even weirder is that it is possible to link the playbar with the older Subwoofer devices on the S2 network, so why couldnt a newer device be able to do the same thing..
I returned the Sub and will be ditching Sonos (and probably any other system where you "buy into" the system only to be left with uncompatible gear after a while..
As CEO of a public company you get about 3 quarters down before you're out.
And not just the app itself but the fact that despite mounting criticism from the community they didn't immediately revert it. Thus demonstrating that they don't really care about their own, up until that point, very loyal customers.
Sonos has been around for many years now. When it launched, smartphones weren’t dominant. To control a Sonos you had to buy a controller specifically for it. It had its own wireless networking because WiFi wasn’t dominant. To use it with WiFi you needed to buy a separate bridge.
Online music services weren’t a thing like they are now. Music collections were on your local hard drive.
Back then the main competition for Sonos was paying a pro to hard-wire a speaker system into your house. I saw one of these about five years ago. Built into the wall in the kitchen was a cassette tape deck.
All that has changed. Now there are wireless speakers from JBL, Apple, Amazon, Bose, Google, and at least a dozen others. There’s Bluetooth. There’s AirPlay.
The Sonos app was ok for its time, but it’s an outdated model now. But at least the app used to be good at controlling Sonos. Now it’s not even great for that.
Without that outdated app model, there’s no reason to buy Sonos. Just pick from…anybody else. Many are cheaper and sound just as good. They don’t rely on an app, which is good-just use Airplay or Bluetooth.
As bad as the app is, it’s not a trigger of the decline of Sonos. Is just a symptom of it. The company has no future. Thus its release of headphones that don’t even integrate well with the Sonos system. These are just as pointless as its speakers.
I doubt Sonos is around in a few years’ time.
Sonos' product is convenience, experience, and decent audio, in that order. Mini speaker voice assistant things equal/beat them in 2 of those categories, and high-end audio brands beat them in the third, leaving them holding the bad in the middle.
Also, multiroom. AirPlay does it OK. BT does not.
Now I'm using AirPlay, because it's working more reliably than the Sonos app. Which is a surprise, because it used to be the other way around.
If Sonos goes away, I guess I'll switch to HomePods? I'd rather not, given the prices and reliability, but I really can't imagine going to BT.
Boards are typically loyal to their CEOs (if the stock and revenue are performing well). They'll never fire a CEO who's coming out of a double-digit percentage growth last quarter.
Thus, the reason he fell out of the boards' favor is the low performance primarily and this was the last straw indeed.
My instinct is to think it's fuel on a fire that was already burning - declining sales across the market, smart speakers taking a big slice out of Sonos' pie, and missing the boat on new markets (headphones) … and then a bad app release being the straw that broke the camel's back.
I ended up designing the system myself. Wired in speakers, down to the basement where all the receivers are. I'm really happy with the result, and grateful I didn't get bullied into a specific Vendor.
Not everyone has this luxury. Once the drywall is up, it's really hard to get a decent whole home system and Sonos was the way to do that. My Dad and my father-in-law are in deep with Sonos. I can feel their anger and frustration when we're over. They really did their customers dirty.
Meanwhile, although twice the price, the Naim Mu-So Qb 2 I also bought recently is simply a marvel. Highly recommended.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42689139
I've got a Denon amp which has Heos, had random Alexa/Google Home devices previously, random amps with just Bluetooth or line in whatever. Thought there must be a way to sync these things, think previously there was the Google Chrome audio?
The WiiM devices seem nice but is that the price of entry to sync various unrelated audio ecosystems then?
Edit: had only seen the price of the highest end ultra device, this is actually very reasonable..
The other option for multi-room sync is AirPlay, on any device where that is possible (including wiim), so it’s pretty easy to solve multi-room audio these days.
Chromecast Audio lost the ability to do multi-room sync in a patent dispute with sonos
i'm not sure what device you're looking at, but i've got a wiim pro plus and it definitely supports airplay - i was just using it yesterday.
It seems like the newest and most expensive devices (WiiM Amp Pro & WiiM Ultra) do not support Airplay.
i had been considering an ultra to replace my tv soundbar, but no airplay is probably a dealbreaker for me.
It somehow just works? Unreal. updates are bugfixes and new features… Most unreal thing. Their phone app didnt require me to create account? When was last time i saw that?! It just found speakers, setup network and Bye, enjoy.
Raspberry Pi + Snapcast + Any speaker with an AUX input
I've got a few Pi's hooked up around the house now to extra speakers, home stereo, and even a .NET snapcast client running on my desktop PC.
That setup plus Music Assistant has been awesome so far. No proprietary hardware or closed source software :)
Even Apple has never been that bad. They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
People don’t realize sound was solved decades ago. How they could get the same stereo their grandfather could have ordered from the sears catalog and some cabinets from that sears catalog and that would be better sound than they are capable of ever perceiving, and how it would last them their entire life on that one stereo and probably the lives of multiple generations of family members. With IO that has always been a standard and always will be a standard. And a stereo like this isn’t even terribly expensive. A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
Instead they are sold soundbars and other crap tiny speakers that are not built to last, and might use specific io to connect over open standards that have been around for decades. They end up spending quite a lot more money for a shit experience that they are none the wiser that there are even alternatives to, without becoming audiophiles themselves consuming hundreds of pages of relevant media in that niche.
What a cash cow of an industry.
Was looking recently at the power requirements of an amp + subwoofer + 5 5.1 JBL surround speakers.
The setup was done decade ago, and the power needed for it was nuts. Something like 500W for a Denon amp and 250W for a JBL subwoofer?
For reference something like a OG HomePod consumes what 45W? The Sony srs xg500 boombox can last 30hours and is a giant room shaking boombox.
The difference in power efficiency between these old and new setups are nuts. Nevermind compatibility with AirPlay, streaming etc…
I will say that the Sony upright boom boxes aren't to be slept on (and, if one is active, fat chance). They're quite good for their intended use cases (parties, and closed Best Buys during clean-up/inventory).
Amplifiers are quoted in peak output, not average (and play some games with other parameters e.g. resistance) to capture bigger-number-better sales. A 750w system will consume nowhere near 750w at typical listening volumes (just like your 750w PC doesn't use 18 kWh every day.)
Even with quite old and inefficient amp + speaker combo, 30W of sound is usually a lot(!).
Tube amps are an exception. They can be very power hungry, but it’s difficult to buy such tech today compared to class D etc.
Still rocking my early 90s system. Has required a couple of amp repairs (capacitors and sticky relay) but no big issue. Bought a Bluetooth DAC for streaming stuff. Job done.
The entire digital ecosystem seems to be heading this way. Even cars
I appreciate the value in a basic stereo system but there are some major differences in functionality to the end user.
https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/port
Although I laughed out loud that they're asking $450 for that little box. That's pretty cheeky. The BOM on that must be $15. Margin level: Apple!
I wonder if they make it $450 to discourage doing just what I'm describing. To make people consider that for that kind of money they could buy one decent Sonos speaker and "simplify." Even though the Sonos speaker won't have anywhere near the sound quality or longevity of a 40-year-old stereo amp and speakers.
Sounds great though. I’m just a bit hesitant to leave it powered on all the time which means I don’t use it much compared to my Bluetooth speakers. Old power supplies are not very efficient. They can get hot. There is also a decent amount of dust. And then there is the risk of some old cap blowing.
Neither a Sonos Port nor something like an Alexa Echo Dot nor the long-discontinued Chromecast Audio can awaken my stereo (whether from 1955 or 2025), select the appropriate input, and allow me to start playing music from my phone.
A Sonos speaker does allow that, though.
And so might a modern sound bar when combined with things like CEC and a regular-ass $25 HDMI Chromecast.
I did find this interesting comment, though:
> You can get a secondhand Sonos Connect (Gen 2) for about $100 these days; they are the predecessor of the Port and are functionally the same for your purposes.
Also if I wanted to make a product like the Connect/Port I think I would spend another $3 in materials to add both an IR blaster (like the Harmony hub has -- it's so powerful it bounces off the walls perfectly well even to devices on different shelves) for amps with remotes, and to also offer as a separate purchase, a simple relay switch module for old stereos that don't have remotes -- they could be left on and have their power controlled by the Sonos.
As far as I know that's not a thing with any Sonos or competing product, though.
THX introduced the trigger port to allow one amp to start other amps. Before that amps would have a 110V passthrough socket.
THX trigger is a mono 1/8th inch / 3.5mm TS plug. Each device usually has one 12V in and a 12V out. While it's on, it'll output 12V at up to 30mA[1]. Due to current fluctuation and the low max amp it's recommended to use an opto-electronic isolator at the input.
THX originally introduced it to allow for home cinema surround. At the time commercially available amps only supported 2 channels, so the first THX systems had one receiver decoding the dolby signal, providing a line level output that you'd connect to multiple stereo amps. Due to the currents required the 110V passthrough wasn't an option, so 12V trigger was born.
Before 12V trigger existed the IR/Remote port, which allowed you to connect an external IR receiver to TVs, VHS recorders and Amps. This used the same plug, but would modulate the IR remote signal directly.
You could also use this to connect multiple devices and allow them to send remote control codes to one another. But that feature disappeared quickly due to limited compatibility.
In computers 12V trigger and remote ports inspired the I²C based DDC standard for VGA monitors, which allowed turning them on or off or changing settings. DVI and DisplayPort kept DDC as is, while HDMI expanded DDC into the CEC standard, which also allows controlling volume or sending media controls in a standardized way. Nowadays 12V trigger is mostly being replaced by HDMI CEC.
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1. Some devices support up to 80mA, Sonos even provides 100mA
This would allow a Sonos Port to have a dedicated amplifier connected (for driving one big stereo pair of speakers, or maybe an array of 70v distributed audio speakers, or who knows what) and control when it is powered on.
But it won't turn on my AV receiver (it has 12v triggers, but they're all outputs), nor switch its input mode appropriately.
(Yeah, sure. I can hack something up with an ESP32 with IR or RS-232 or even Lego Mindstorms or something from Switchbot, but Sonos buyers and hardware hackers are naturally somewhat diametrically opposed: A person who buys Sonos gear wants stuff that just works, not a new hobby.)
Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like)
Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect.
Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers.
I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025).
Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together.
You have one of those fancy hifis that has hdmi inputs and digital input selection and whatnot? Okay yeah you'd have to roll your own HDMI CEC automation again with a raspberry pi or whatever. Eminently doable.
There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to invest the time in doing loads of DIY shenanigans, but honestly it's pretty easy these days. For me, I think the "this is too complicated for me to implement" bar is not high enough to warrant buying Sonos
Seriously, this was a thing 10 years ago! I bought five, and they all still work perfectly. They do multiroom audio. They are compatible with the new Nest speakers. The only reason we can't have them today is corporate greed and rent-seeking MBA fuckers.
In the US, MSRP at launch in 2015 was $35.
With inflation, that's worth ~$46 today.
I see one on eBay right now (open-box, allegedly never used) for $60, delivered, in buy-it-now format.
$60 is not an ideal sort of price, but it's not something that seems extortionist or anything compared to the inflation-adjusted price from 2015.
A self-updating hardware/software combination from Google can never be a long term solution. Reliance on old units from eBay (or not!) cannot make that situation any better nor any worse.
(FYI, I chased that route, there is/was _one_ model that worked as an airplay2 device, but it still didn't feel as "native" as the modern HomePods ... icon was different, pairing was slower and slightly flakey... I moved to the belkin directly and have been happier. That and home assistant allowing single target airplay1 support to chrome cast / google nest devices sometimes is useful in a pinch)
I'm being serious. If it has nothing to do with Nintendo then it's terrible branding.
The upside is that they mostly seem to care about making good products rather than branding.
TBH, I didn't even know such devices existed. I thought that if I wanted to stream from Spotify without a PC I would need to go down the Sonos route, which I obviously don't want to do.
The problem with not having good branding is that potential customers walk right past your products. It's only chance comments in this thread that's made me take a second look. Thanks for the info :-)
[0]: https://github.com/juhovh/shairplay
- stream from a wide number of subscription services
- stream from your own DLNA server or samba share
- cast from Chromecast or AirPlay
- with multiple devices, you can do multi-room synchronized streaming
- apply parametric EQ, including (in the higher end models) auto room correction
- hook up a digital source (eg, TV) so you can apply EQ
- hook up an analog device (like a turntable) and stream it to the rest of the devices in the house
The app's surprisingly good, the firmware updated regularly.
The cheapest version is under $100. They're like Chromecast Audio's on steroids. When (eventually) they die or get superseded, it's easy to replace without needing to touch the rest of the system.
I have 3 at the moment, the main one hooked up my amp and speakers from the 80s, which I picked up used in the 2000s.
Like for example: My dad bought a hulking integrated Akai amp / cassette / turntable combo in the early 80s. Every user-facing component was brushed aluminum, the volume pot was the size of a Dallas church, and it probably would have killed any living organism you dropped it on.
My dad died over a decade ago and I guarantee that amp is still sitting in someone's living room heating the place up. I'm just mad it's not in mine.
I have a rather nice NAD amplifier that I bought about 29 years ago. It had to be repaired once at about the 6 year mark. Recently, it has developed a new electronic failure mode that I don't believe can be repaired.
So ... yes, but let's not overdo the "never have to make another home audio purchase" part ...
Speaker and amplifier design are vastly better than even 15 years ago, partially because of better engineering and mostly because of advances in electronics. An entry level receiver today would wipe the floor with consumer level equipment from the 80s.
Still, traditional Hifi is dying to the "crap tiny speaker" folks. The company that owns Denon and Marantz may go out business this year.
It is ironic because traditional Hifi is in an amazing place in terms of value. I recently bought a budget (<$300) setup for my PC and I'm blown away by what a couple of modest bookshelf speakers, a modern mini-amp and a compact subwoofer can accomplish.
Oh man. I guess I better stock up on the latest Marantz before the go out of business. The last one I had was my dad's and it lasted 50 years. Actually, it still works, it just requires you to manually power it on.
Let's break this down into the components:
Speaker drivers: very little change
Speaker chassis design: still changing, last major change was improved computational modeling
Amplifier: Class D was the last major change, not much since
DSP: Still evolving, getting better every day
AV Receiver control boards: Standards are changing every day, whether that's new HDMI standards, new bluetooth versions, or new AirPlay/Chromecast protocols.
TL;DR: Buy old speakers and a new receiver/amp.
I wonder if it also ties into living situations and customers that are in a separate house.
With my apartment-situation, I'm always using a headset (or bluetooth headphones.) Perhaps not crap tiny speakers, but not so big that making them good takes as much effort.
My desk setup is their AD-18 driving L/R bookshelf speakers and a compact subwoofer via its dedicated sub output. I love all the input options including traditional analog, toslink, BT/NFC, USB for high-res: https://www.smsl-audio.com/portal/product/detail/id/566.html
The home-audio market is consolidated into a tiny number of manufacturers masquerading under once-proud brands they bought. The crippling incompetence of the products themselves is depressing.
A few years ago my Denon A/V receiver crapped out and I decided to go "upmarket" and get an NAD T758. I accept a bit of quirkiness from a smaller name, but "quirkiness" doesn't come close to describing the design and functionality defects that plagued this thing. Everything from baffling menu navigation (not kidding: Pressing Enter did not select a menu entry; you were supposed to use an arrow key) to the fact that it would only pass 720p video because it reported erroneous EDID info to HDMI devices. It didn't pass the info from the connected display device; it just provided its own EDID blob to everything, which reported a max resolution of 720p.
The NAD also featured Dirac processing, which I shelled out for to get the full license and spent hours with a test mic profiling my room and speakers. Then... it would just lose the entire configuration. Deleted off the receiver. "We haven't been able to figure out why this happens," said NAD. In fact, in several years they never fixed a single one of the crippling defects I encountered and reported.
But NAD isn't the only shitshow in town. Let me address the biggest impediment to whole-home audio (or even multi-zone audio): manufacturers' bizarre conceit that anyone can use secondary zones that only play ANALOG sources. The NAD was crippled by this stupidity, as is the top-of-the-line Pioneer I bought to replace it.
In the case of the NAD, I addressed this defect by running RCA cables across the back of the receiver, from its preamp outputs to a CD-player input; and assigning that input to Zone 2. Why the hell didn't NAD just do that internally with a switch?
On the Pioneer, it's actually worse. There ARE no preamp outputs. It has THREE zones, one of which I can tie to the main one but the third, yep, can only play analog sources.
All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
BTW, I did build a patch bay with switches, to wire the secondary zone in parallel with the first... but this overloaded one pair of amps in the NAD and destroyed the entire receiver. Yep: NAD doesn't have a simple overload breaker. They just burn the entire amplifier board up; that's the breaker. Unfuckingbelievable.
But back to the main issue: Who is seriously going to dick around trying to select sources and adjust volume to each zone (with what, by the way, an app?) on one receiver instead of simply buying a bookshelf system for every remote room you want to play music in? I sure as shit wouldn't, and I'm the kind of person who ran digital cables under my house to an equipment closet so I could have a proper surround setup in my living room. I have a projector and home-built screen, but even I would never bother with the stupid usage scenario Pioneer, NAD, and the two other makers envision:
This scenario revolves around nonexistent people who are going to put on a RECORD or TAPE, then go to the other side of their house or down to their rec room for half an hour... and then come running back to the other side of the house to flip the record or tape over. WTF.
It's the absurd design defects that I will never excuse. I mean... incompetent MENUS? A modern receiver that doesn't support even HD video?
My burned-out T758 is gathering dust in my office; I'm keeping it in hopes of using the chassis for a project case someday.
I would replace my stupid Pioneer too if anyone made a stand-alone surround processor with preamp outputs. Then I'd get separate amplifiers and that would be that. But nobody makes such a processor, as far as I can tell.
What you’re looking for is this.
https://emotiva.com/products/basx-mc1-13-2-channel-dolby-atm...
Also I hate the new app with fiery passion
Too bad they messed up the app so badly. I've written some hardware-control applications and they're not necessarily easy, but... well, that's the job.
Meanwhile I've had my time stolen on numerous "ghost job" postings. Maybe someday, somewhere someone will take a lesson from Boeing and Sonos and other companies that have suffered from grossly incompetent software engineering and put a halt to the despicable disrespect for our time and knowledge.
Maybe a smart speaker switch like an Audioflow[0] is up your alley?
[0] https://flow.audio
"This three way switch has Zone A and Zone B in Series. Zone C is in Parallel with A+B."
Important info that they provide up-front, which I like.
There's quite a rise in Chinese HiFi companies that are making some great equipment. I've found audiosciencereview.com an excellent resource for getting back into hifi and avoiding much of the nonsense. I recently picked up a Fosi amp which, to me, functions at least as well as my NAD from the 80s. It cost me half of what I just spent on getting the NAD serviced.
> All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
Look into WiiM streamers. Cheap and quite impressive IME. Multi-room streaming from digital or analog sources, PEQ, room correction etc.
Actually that's what Denon's HEOS does, might want to take another look at their mid-level X1800H or the bigger ones if you need more zones from a single AVR instead of multiple devices.
Out of all the receivers I've owned in the last 20 years, I liked Denons the best.
It was a massive pain to put out all the cables, adjust the system manually little by little (the setup mic kinda helped, but wasn't that good).
Then I got a Sonos Beam and that set of "crap tiny speakers" with a fancy DSP brought so much more dimension to movies that it wasn't even funny. Upgraded to a Sub and it automatically offloaded those frequencies to it and the Beam got even better now that it didn't have to cosplay a subwoofer.
For setup all I had to do was walk around the space and wave my phone around and the difference was clearly audible even to my non-discerning ears.
Later I upgraded to an Arc + got two rears and everything got a lot better.
The v2 app is utter crap, I haven't had to use it for anything else than Trueplay adjustment when we moved a while ago. The v1 let me debug what the soundbar was receiving (my TV was sending data in the wrong format and I was just getting fancy stereo instead of Dolby Atmos). V2 doesn't have any power user features at all.
I'm not going back to a wired setup with a separate amp unless I get a dedicated theater room I can sound proof and manage the acoustics. I _am_ considering switching to a brand that doesn't need an app to setup, but it's slim pickings in the upper tier of soundbars.
I’m sure things can get better, but I’m pretty happy with my setup as-is. I’d probably splurge on an OLED TV first. I have an 85” Sony X91J that I quite like, but I can’t deny the absolute inky blacks of OLED (just couldn’t justify the price at the time at that size).
Just a basic sound bar instead of the shitty rear-firing TV speakers is a complete game changer for few hundred monetary units.
This really isn't true at all. HiFi has an obscene amount of snake-oil and non-rigorous design decision making.
Audio Science Review (https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php) has documented this very clearly and well.
Custom solutions with, like, snapcast and raspberries (like mine), works and you don't need to deal with any of this, but then you need to deal with software setup annoyances. It get's technical.
Not wireless transmission, and not uniform spatial distribution.
AFAIK, Sonos was about those two. They didn't solve them either, there's still plenty of space to make a dent there.
For me, it is the removal of x86-32 bit software support. The removal wasn't needed at all and broke all the steam games.
A) it would have been huge news if Apple bricked all iPhone 7, and
B) it makes no sense to brick iPhone 7, but not the ones before it.
People will think what you’re saying is hyperbole; however, I was on a walk with the family, and I saw a Sonos speaker in the trash. It looked like new and a fairly recent model. I lugged it home, and it was a $US500 Sonos Play:5 speaker system [1].
Once home, I plugged it in, and it powered up.
I tried to pair it with my iPhone using the new Sonos app, and it didn’t work (the app never found the speaker).
I then tried the same again using my development Android device, and it instantly worked!
Once it was set up with the Android app, I could access it via the iPhone version of the app.
I can only imagine some iPhone owner literally threw it in the trash because he couldn’t get the iOS app to work. Bonkers…
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/pb-BfEVPbWlDe-hkxfK0.png
EDIT: Whoops, here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70
They (Sonos) basically willfully attempted to brick their consumer devices, and since many sonos customers were prosumer enthusiasts but not technical (hw or sw) it really did signal EOL for the products. Bananas. I still have a my Play1/3/5 infrastructure operating through Home Assistant and AirBridge that turns them into Airplay devices. It's not perfect but still gives them utility. Considering how much they f'n cost..
Funnily enough, I own an electronics company and Dave is just down the road :-)
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/pb-BfEVPbWlDe-hkxfK0.png
I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.
However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.
And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.
Yet people will still buy Sonos!
Depending on which software is in use for streaming operations, you could also use ‘standard’ WiFi-enabled speakers like something from KEF (LS50) or dynaudio.
Just from top of my head. Maybe someone else has a comprehensive liste at hand.
They just had a 30% sale for the holidays though, so might not be worth getting them at full price
I am very annoyed at the planned obsolescence that Sonos has been pushing for a while now. I stopped buying new Sonos hardware, I'm still using all my old hardware, just not with the terrible Sonos apps, but with Roon.
I also took to aggressively repairing very old hardware that was actually failing (ZP80 players), because of the Sonos planned obsolescence policy. Recapping the PSU did the job, and I intend to keep them going for as long as I possibly can.
As a fringe benefit, it lets me use all of my old Sonos devices (as well as a modern Denon). And lets me listen to my FLAC music in a reasonably decent phone app as well.
In other words, I think the value proposition is sound. Importantly, their goals are aligned with mine: I want to listen to music and I pay them to maintain software that lets me listen to music. They want to get paid, so they maintain software that lets me listen to music. This is a very different relationship than most.
Works for me!
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/5/21166777/sonos-ending-recy...
> Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same.
https://www.engadget.com/2019-12-31-sonos-recycle-mode-expla...
Apple has done a good job of supporting old devices with new OS releases; they also subset old OS’s. That seems like a fair trade.
My own MBP from the same era as yours succumbed to a logic board long before then, and I replaced it with a late 2016 MBP, which came with a touch bar + butterfly keyboard, had terrible performance, stopped receiving updates after Monterey (2021), no longer receives security updates, and (obviously) can't run modern ARM-based Mac software. (Incidentally, it was also the single most expensive computer I ever bought, even to date!) Not a very solid run, I'd say.
Personal anecdotes aside, I don't think it's too disputable that Mac has never taken backwards compatibility or computer longevity anywhere as seriously as Windows or Linux have.
Ah, yeah, I do recall the horror stories about the butterfly keyboard ones. Sorry to hear it. I was able to skip that entire generation because mine ran like a champ.
> Personal anecdotes aside, I don't think it's too disputable that Mac has never taken backwards compatibility or computer longevity anywhere as seriously as Windows or Linux have.
I think this is probably true. Unfortunately, the reason I moved to MacBook's in the first place was because I had a terrible run of Windows PCs & laptops. I think I had 4 or so between 2002 and 2012, but only 1 between 2012 and 2021. I suppose that's why I'm partial to Macs.
Please don't do anything security critical with them.
Other OS providers do support the devices longer. At least for core OS updates.
9 years of OS support seems pretty good to me.
Microsoft is abandoning 63% of its user base later this year, with an untold amount of those users unable to update to Windows 11 due to the requirements of a processor released after 2017. Keep in mind that with how the average Windows user buys their device, it's common to see brand new computers with two years old CPUs. With the pandemic having forced everyone to scrape the bottom of the barrel for laptops, there are so many people getting bitten by Microsoft right now.
My iPad is too old to upgrade to the new OS, but yet no software is available for it in the store, because all new apps are encouraged to be re-released for the newest version of the OS.
My device is completely frozen in time from whatever software was installed on it when it went out of support.
However, I do suspect app developers don't want to be on the hook for supporting old versions, should they continue to serve things in need of security fixes etc etc. I don't entirely attribute it to malice.
https://appleinsider.com/inside/ios/tips/how-to-get-apps-for...
Your link is very helpful, but also notes some of the limitations. Namely, this doesn't work if the software has been purged due to not being updated recently, and it doesn't really work to find new-to-me software (that I haven't purchased previously).
Even if it's technically possible to reinstall software that I've previously purchased, it is very limited in its ability to install new-to-me software.
That's the deal, pray Apple doesn't alter it further.
Music assistant is getting baked into home assistant, and can provide a control plane: https://www.music-assistant.io/
You can use squeeze lite to make servers it clients: https://github.com/ralph-irving/squeezelite
You can install it on an esp32: https://github.com/sle118/squeezelite-esp32
And there's a decent wiki full of stuff about it: https://wiki.lyrion.org/index.php/Main_Page.html
The remaining device has mechanical issues (as old speakers sometimes do). This one is disappointing, but at least it isn't irrational.
Funny thing is, we thought it was silly when we moved in - then we grew to love it. Now I hate them!
I have two Play 5's that I have had for a decade and they're still currently set up working completely fine on an Apple device. That's a speaker that was released 16 years ago and still works through the Sonos app, still allows me to play Spotify, still works natively with the Playbar to watch movies and TV.
That sounds pretty good to me. If people want to throw out their hardware and buy new that's fine, but they haven't needed to throw out their Play 5's.
If I was still using an Apple iPhone from 2009 you can bet it would be a terrible experience
Every other device, Play 1, Play 5 (Gen 2), AMP, Play 3, Playbar, Playbase, Sub all of these products were made compatible with both S1 & S2 apps.
Outside of the Play 5 (Gen 1) there weren't really many other products people were buying that were left out.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that demands I enable precise location in order to "discover" the speaker on my network. Approximate location is not enough. Sonos demands your home address before it permits you to use your speaker. Even aux line-in.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that requires I log-in before I can set certain things unrelated to online use, such as the volume limiter.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that has an obscene amount of delay even when using the aux line-in. And yes I toggled the setting in the app to "reduce delay" and followed all the steps to reduce the delay as much as possible, but the delay was still there. Forget about using a Play5 gen2 for home theatre or anywhere you need low-latency. Rant over!
Any app that uses direct bluetooth could theoretically get your precise location from a Bluetooth geotag, so Apple requires apps to get "precise location" permission before being allowed to use bluetooth.
I confused it with the "Access Wi-Fi Information Entitlement". If an app wants to scan for nearby Wifi networks, it needs the "precise location" permission [1], because the names of Wifi networks can be used to determine precise location.
Maybe the Sonos app wants to scan for Wifi networks?
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/n...
Honestly, if they had a checkbox saying "do not share my location with Sonos" it would have eased my anxiety. But they don't, they default everything to "we collect data".
Relying on an unread "privacy policy" as the pinky swear for protecting the data they force users to give up, is bad privacy. You can't even delete your own Sonos account, the "delete account" button doesn't actually perform that function.
But it won't matter saying that because some people refuse to believe that some companies genuinely need to use that.
But they don't need to [use location services]. I only wanted the 3.5mm line in on the Sonos Play5, but was denied unless I jumped through their app "onboarding" routine.
It's essentially a loudspeaker with 3.5mm input. But you must complete the mandatory Sonos induction dance before the input signal is permitted the path to output. Like I said, never again.
It's a shame because I quite liked the sound of the Play5. It's bright, but the wide dispersion is good for certain types of listening at low to medium volume.
Line in is an additional component of the speaker however the entire ethos is controlling the speaker over WiFi by anyone in the home.
As a Sonos purchaser, ironically product longevity was the reason I bought so much of their stuff!
While other similar systems would drop support for old devices eventually, I could be confident with Sonos that I was investing in stuff that would continue to work.
… until now! I’ve started to lose confidence. Which is a shame - I’m moving into a new house and wanting a sub, but now questioning if that’s a sensible decision given I don’t know how long my older speakers will work for now they are going glitchy. Real shame!
What does this refer to? Did Sonos drop support for products? When was this, which products?
I like to reverse decisions further back. The connected speaker is basically a commodity at this point. Sonos does have some nice features, but they are very expensive. I think the ceo saw the down sales and lack of new products and rushed out the app hoping it would work and boost sales. Obviously it was a disaster, but I’m not sure if sticking to the status quo would have led to any different outcome in sales.
Catalina literally just dumped half the software that ever ran on MacOS overnight to make the transition to Apple Silicon seem smoother than it actually was.
The app update they're talking about is the one that got released last year which is terrible, it keeps crashing, doesn't work with time zone and a bunch of other stuff
Luckily I only use my Sonos IKEA lamp only with Air Play, but the few times I have to use their app? Bonkers. Absolutely trash.
Hoping the new one will have more foresight to not screw over existing customers in the face of the new shiny.
In other news, I hear Framework is looking to get into other hardware niches… if they ever made a networked speaker, I’d buy it.
The speakers expose a few SOAP-based APIs to any clients on the LAN. Those allow for track control, grouping, etc. They don't allow adding new music services, but they can do the vast majority of daily interaction. These APIs continue to work nearly flawlessly even for my Play:1 devices that are 10 years old.
Streaming via AirPlay is indeed hit-or-miss, but it hasn't gotten worse in the past couple years.
I control my Sonos from a jQuery-based web application I wrote nearly 10 years ago that runs on a raspberry pi in my closet. I have not had to change anything in several years, and I use my 15+device Sonos system all the time.
The new app is indeed a dumpster fire. Somehow the company managed to make their first-party application worse than any of the third-party applications.
Had this not happened sledgehammers would have been going through speakers.
I would still prefer they rolled back to the old app, or made it as an optional re-release.
Because it is older it has problems with dark mode/light mode. But it is as fast and reliable as ever.
https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/downgrade-a-sonos-pr...
Did this change during all the noise? (Entirely possible I was oblivious)
It now works instantly. Even my customsd sources work, and they work better than the previous app too.
Only thing is I had to go to the desktop app to get the customsd sources working on a new network.
I haven’t used the official App in months now.
The actual Sonos integration still works (IIRC) with most of my speakers, in that I can use them as targets in automations involving audio (sees them on network and integrates directly).
The AirSonos add-in makes the Gen1 devices show up on your network as AirPlay targets. IME, AirSonos can be a little buggy since you're going through a bridge but not enough to really matter. It's functional value far exceeds the frustration (90% of the time it works 100% of the time).
With all this, you might be stuck with the old room names set when you had access to the Sonos native app. I think AirSonos lets me mask those names, but every now and then I have to remember that, oh yeah, the Play3 labeled Kitchen is actually now actually bedroomxyz. But again, it works for all intents and purposes. I can airplay from sonos, audible, etc to my gen1 sonos equipment, and that's waaaay better than tossing them into a chinese river (recycling) or a local landfill.
The EEVBlog video about the "Fronos" project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70) involved embedding a new amp with bluetooth into the Play:5 chasis, and there are certainly amps these days you could consider that have built-in airplay. Something for the project queue. For me, using the above with Home Assistant keeps this project at the bottom of the queue, though it's probably the "right" solution long term.
I’d say that leads me to believe it’s an app issue versus just Bluetooth. Agree that BT by itself has a reputation to match, but in this case Sonos is to blame. The other apps recommended in the post work well.
because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar, it's some of the best sound quality you can find for home audio, and it doesn't require a month of product research to figure it out. it's easily available in most big-box stores, and unlike some other brands they don't have a shit-tier line of products that look indistinguishable from their good stuff so you have to be cautious as a consumer to buy only the good stuff. if you go to best buy and spend $500 on sonos products, you're going to get your moneys worth.
it's too bad their app sucks, because their hardware doesn't.
I know its some choices but any of them are good choice its mostly flavours. What you get for same money will sound better and 100% last longer because you have modular system instead of glued box that stops working when Sonos stops caring about the product (like they did before).
fwiw i did exactly what you're suggesting for my personal use, i've got a wiim pro and a fosi v3 and kanto 5" speakers and i'm very happy with my setup. but i'm a nerd who likes shopping for things like that, and i know enough to know that most people would rather not. and it's not like i saved anything compared to going with a sonos.
edit: and, as i just learned a little further down the thread, you've also got to be careful which model of wiim you buy - the newest and nicest ones don't have airplay.
> because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar
They were really expensive, but people confused quality (why else would it cost so much) with convenience and were happy not knowing about anything else.
It's a good strategy, works well for other companies. But when you remove the convenience part of it everything else falls apart too.
I would not say you didnt get anything back. You got setup where at minimum the speakers will work for decades.
People who pay for WiiM ultra most likely dont care about Airplay anyway because Airplay 2 devices send lossy AAC 256kbps audio. You dont get streamer for 329usd to send reencoded music there. You get it so it streams from the original sources directly.
the reason airplay matters so much is that even if you want great audio quality and care about the bitrate of your music, other people in your house don't and just want to make music come out of the speakers. no airplay resigns the device to "nobody else can use it" status.
The whole point is Sonos is easy. One product for speakers. Another one for a sub (which most people don't even need). Ok now you're done. And then there's people who really don't have space for all that.
Then again you can look for wiim mini packaged with active speakers - they have colab/packages like this. I recently got wiim+edifier [1] in sale for 130usd and its shockingly good combo for fraction of sonos (especially since its stereo).
[1] https://a.co/d/12SwuBQ
Are you familar with the models I've referenced? Both include streamers.
When they came out, there was nothing else that had their combination of sound quality and app features.
Before their new app, the competition had basically caught up, Sonos was only marginally better in a few ways.
With their new app, I'd never recommend Sonos.
Also what brands make speakers that sound just as good for the price and simplicity of setup? Asking legitimately not a jab.
Sound is fine, not hifi just a notch below, but good hifi surround is a 10k thingie. They cost 500-800 in Europe, much less than Sonos surround+sub solutions. No issues with connectivity, connect via eArc with TV without issues and starts with it, bluetooth with both Samsung and Apple OK too. Have some extra features when paired with Samsung TVs. One detail I love - extra bass control on remote, so I can move it down easily during late night watching (low frequencies travel better through walls).
I like them a lot and run Spotify from phone on them all the time.
I've always been amazed at how different my experience apparently was to everyone else's, because I only ever see glowing praise (before the apparently disastrous new app rollout, which still sounds like a better experience than I had). I can only assume there were significant updates and improvements in the time since, because the company wouldn't have lasted a month if our experience was typical.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683753
I looked at the Sonos ecosystem for this, but their non-speaker devices are absurdly priced. The network audio streamer is 449 and the amp is 699. WiiM amps are either 299 or 379 and their network streamer ranges from 149 to 329. I have a few of the network streamers which were 149. They connect into my receiver, into an old amp I have, etc. and work perfectly.
Speakers with decent sound (sure, your separates system is going to sound better, but pretty decent). They have some really fancy wireless mesh tech in an era where that's unheard of. They pick up your local music collection and have a controller application on most OS's that allows you to build stereo pairs or tv surround systems wirelessly, arbitrarily group together rooms in your house, stream music from wherever to wherever and generally just have music in the places you want it with little hassle. I still have some Sonos play:1 speakers I got in 2012 that are going strong, even though they live mostly outdoors now.
Now, if those aren't your use-cases, and you really do care about high fidelity sound (I don't), then it's probably not for you. But it has been great for me and I've built up quite a lot of speakers.
Unfortunately (and here's the subject of TFA) - in the middle of last year they screwed the pooch, and half the time their app doesn't even load any more :/
In the 10 years I've owned them, I've used the app less than 10 total times. I much rather prefer just using them as an over priced surround system and use my Playstation to play music through the TV/sonos.
I would not buy or recommend new Sonos products now. Occasionally I do think about adding to my setup but since the update debacle that's no longer an option. Over the years my Sonos has been pretty reliable, and very importantly, the wife and kids can use it easily. We just want "Play X in Room Y." It works very well for that. Even my nerdy self is OK with that... I have plenty of other things to nerd/worry about and I just want my music to play.
I did have a period of instability after I moved some Sonos speakers around, and I must say their tech support was pretty good (this was maybe four years ago). They looked at my logs and told me it was a weak signal issue, which I thought was ridiculous and initially dismissed... but after digging some more and troubleshooting my home signals, it turns out they were right.
Old Sonos with old S1 app is still great for me! It really pains me to see how far they have fallen.
As a long time apartment/condo dweller, Sonos basically can't do what I'm looking for.
I don't know what makes them different, or if they are just that popular that I'm seeing the noise, but it's something that I'd personally dig into more before investing.
It was super cool when it all worked but if it took them this long to get rid of that CEO, then I don't seem them turning around at any point soon.
For me, the major thing that matters is that I can see a device in spotifys device list and can play to that device. Similarly, it needs to be zero setup for anyone else on my wifi network (wife, kids, friends). WiiM covers that perfectly.
Granted, there is some work there if you don't already have speakers. I personally think Spotify is a great product. I just don't want my speakers running an operating system. I have speakers as old as 25 years that work perfectly with the WiiM. No point in adding additional tech in a speaker that works perfectly as-is. My biggest worry (which Spotify has been pretty good about) is that the speakers work over WiFi and at some point, will be sunsetted. Maybe not within the next few years, but I don't have much faith that a Sonos system will work well in 10-15 years.
I only have them in one room, so I can’t comment on multi-room audio.
I'm happy with the form factor, audio quality, and overall TV experience, and I honestly haven't used the app enough to even notice if there was a big update.
That said, I haven't used any Sonos multi-room functionality. But I have noticed weird gaps in functionality with the Arc's Amazon Alexa integration. The Arc doesn't support moving audio to it from other Alexa speakers, or vice versa. I have to imagine they deliberately disabled this, as if I'm going to replace all my Alexa devices just to get Sonos multi-room audio working!
But my setup is just Beam + Ikea Symfonisk for surrounds. Planning to add the sub mini later on.
My guess is the issues start to occur the bigger your setup and if you heavily use the app? I havent touched the app since setting it up.
We're on starlink, which is great but adds some latency to some stuff, and the new app has been terrible - barely loads, claims to start playing but nothing happens, volume adjustments take random amounts of time or may be ignore, all sorts.
But also when not using the app (just watching tv) the surround system is still pretty perfect.
But the app they released last year is an unreliable clusterfuck, and while you don't need the app for things like tv audio, if you want to stick an album on in your shed while you do some carpentry (one of my use-cases recently) then you're probably going to want to use it. And right now that's very hit or miss.
So I think a little bit of wait and see is probably the right choice. If they get good again and drop the moronic everything-goes-through-our-cloud approach, I'd have no hesitation in recommending them again.
A lot of this could be solved if Apple put some basic engineering effort into the airplay UI, such as adding aliased groups. Every time I want to play to my effing speakers it's a 60 second ordeal.
Sometimes the little banner pops up from the top of the screen helpfully letting me to play to all of the speakers like I was before. Other times it not-so-helpfully suggests just playing to ONE speaker for some incomprehensible reason.
Still other times, the banner covers what I'm trying to see, and swiping it away seems to activate airplay even when I don't want to.