Sonos is getting rid of its controversial “recycle mode”
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Mopidy acts as a jukebox, streaming files from the server and locally managing playlists and a queue. It enabled me to reuse my old speakers, put a RasPi to good use, and offers a responsive web UI to manipulate the queue from our phones. It was the best low-requirement open source solution I found.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/AudioQuest-Diamond-Cables-Standard-...
How can I do what you’re doing but with airplay and multiple speakers?
70% of the time, I'm on the shield playing video from my nas in kodi... most of the rest, casting to audio + speakers in the bedroom with rain/storm sounds.
Anyone know an alternative that works with (non-rooted) Android devices?
Short lifespan’s for technology that often gets thrown into dumps in the ground isn’t good for the environment
Assuming every different version has a few quirks and bugs, maintaining compatibility between every version and every other soon becomes impractical, especially since you probably want to build some kind of integration test that checks this all works as it should, and that probably involves a lab with all the old hardware and a human running hundreds of tests by hand because it's hard to automate tests on embedded stuff that you can no longer compile software for.
I don't want to say that vendors shouldn't implement custom protocols for an enhanced experience. But, as a consumer, I'd be a lot more likely to shell out for a product like this if I knew that there were a wifi speaker equivalent of PostScript, and that the speaker supported it. That gives me confidence that there will be some least-common-denominator level of functionality that I'll be able to get out of it for as long as the hardware itself lasts.
As it stands, my impression is that these limited-lifespan IoT products are mostly for people whose disposable income is rather more disposable than mine is.
Then build the high-end audio gear into the chassis, such as a solid quality amp and speaker pair.
That way only the the electronics needs to be swapped should the audio quality still be sufficient.
I'm not an audiophile by any stretch, but I appreciate a decent speaker. That being said, solid audio equipment can last much longer than digital tech can.
A system like above could even bring about a new sub-market around swappable chassis. Allow a customer to purchase a chassis in multiple styles and colors for less than a full module. That might mean people would be more willing to buy a "fashion swap" should they redecorate.
This is just hardware integration. It's due to standard interfaces and being designed to last.
What we build with technology now isn't designed to last. It's an intentional part of what we build even if we don't think about it much. It has an impact on end users (and even the environment... think of all the trash).
The rate of interface change is intentional on some levels. And, it's something we can control.
What it requires is a well-engineered protocol (which is what Sonos apparently lacks) that allows for feature additions while maintaining backward compatibility for old hardware and software. The old hardware and software often can't use the new features, but it can continue to work as it always had before.
32MB of ram was enough to run graphical Unix back in the day.
I've had some of this hardware they are discontinuing for over a decade.
My decade-old desktop PC would still work fine with Windows 10, and it’s far more complex than a speaker.
Perhaps.
While I was unlikely to buy Sonos gear in the first place (because I avoid purchasing IoT stuff like that), if I were in the market for gear like this I would certainly not buy Sonos gear now. This step they took was good, but it doesn't erase the memory of their behavior leading up to this.
Sonos has a bunch if opportunities to signal they realized they made a mistake and correct it. Instead they doubled down.
The fact the policy is still in place means they think everything is fine. I think their policy is stupid and so they're not going to get any of my dollars.
Moreover in my perception it signals company's predatory and anti-customer philosophy and I'm convinced that sooner or later they will come up with similar "clever" idea - only difference will be that next time they will try to sell it better or just hide it better.
I do not want to hook PagerDuty up to my home audio system and manage it like my home is a NOC, thank you very much. I threw out my Play:1s, and my Play:5s are now connected by ethernet. They work just fine, but only in the one room of the house close enough to the router to run CAT5.
At some point, this arrangement will no longer be useful to me, and when it does, these speakers are on their way to landfill.
I get what Sonos were trying to do, but the experience felt like running a PC in the 1980s: Too much incidental complexity for an appliance.
I ditched Sonos's software as well, and firewalled the speakers off from phoning home. I play my audio through Airplay 2, and Life is Fine.
Not yet, worried about adding on to a "jenga pile" of technology. But it'll certainly be worth a second look if I decide to move the speakers.
I've used Actiontec and Netgear models at various times, but other people make them. MOCA is a standard and the different models work together fine.
Here's what I bought last. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013J7OBUU/
These Motorola ones are new (since I bought mine) and look nice as well (and cheaper). https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Adapter-Ethernet-2-Pack-MM10... or https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1389945-REG/motorola_...
Also moving the main router higher, and/or more centrally located can help... if it's a really big home, strategic repeaters can help too.
I ran around the house unplugging speakers, some of which are really inconvenient to do, just to reboot a bunch of them. I think what happened is the master (of course, you have no way of knowing which is the master) got wedged, and once i rebooted THAT one, a new master was selected, and all the rest fell into line.
Okay, fine.
But then it happened again yesterday.
And the speakers kept stuttering for the first 10 seconds of every new song, streaming from Spotify. On a gigabit FTTH connection with all ubiquiti APs that work flawlessly for every other client.
My other huge Sonos frustration was their choice to disable streaming-from-phone. To be fair, the feature was an absolute pile of gutter trash; it couldn't tolerate any latency whatsoever, so if you so much as moved your phone around the house during a podcast, it would drop the podcast and move to the next one, and half the time the scrubber didn't work so you had to start over from the beginning of a 2 hour podcast, etc. Their solution to this removed feature was to buy their AirPlay equipped Play1. Which is fine, but I already have all the Play1s I need. In theory, you only need to buy ONE of the new devices, but I guess that means that one's always the master? Or you have to do something to make SURE that one's always the master? I just don't really trust their model enough to throw more money at the problem and hope it solves it.
I probably got burned more than most because I really only bought the Play1s a year or two before they dropped this feature; I think that particular product was quite long in the tooth and it was pretty bad timing, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m still worried they are going to force obsolescence on my older play5 and play1 speakers. I also wonder about how stable the company is, totally based on the clients not being native apps, which isn’t logical but I sometimes feel there’s a couple of audio engineers and a logistics guy with everything else outsourced.
What a crock of shit. Credibility? What's that?
I have multiple wifi access points in my (solid brick) house, because nothing seems to be able to penetrate these walls.
When Sonos works it's great. When it doesn't, I end up spending half an hour having to reset everything to get my randomly disappearing speakers back.
Some are wired, some are wifi, some are on powerline adapters. It's quite a hodge-podge, but none of my other devices have any issues with the setup, so why does Sonos decide to die randomly from time to time?
I've gone through the trouble of switching wifi channels, trialling different ones, just to see if anything improves the situation, but there is no regularity in the failures. It either happens, or it doesn't.
I also do not appreciate that Sonos is seemingly all about streaming services. I wish local NAS playback wasn't treated as second-class citizen...it's the only way I use Sonos.
My music is stored on a computer sitting near a TV and a Yamaha receiver, which runs five main speakers and two subwoofers.
There's a powered speaker set hooked to a Chromecast audio in another room, and a cheap old laptop running an old Yamaha receiver with 2 mains and a sub in the living room.
forked-daapd (you'll want the current version out of github) runs on the main computer and has a web interface. It can talk to the Chromecast and the laptop and the main receiver to send the same audio to all of them. Delays can be adjusted.
I hardly ever do that. Instead, I call up music in whatever room I'm in.
For instance, I inherited a nice receiver that was built in the early 90’s. It sounds great, but I do recognize that being able to stream music and control multi-room speakers through my smartphone (a la Sonos) is desirable.
https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/wireless_stream...
They make one with a stereo amplifier built in, and also one that is just a preamp.
Around here you can still find used squeezebox hardware for a reasonable price. If you want fresh hardware then go for Raspberry Pi with a DAC hat.
If you want to get started easily today then look at https://www.picoreplayer.org/
If you run Windows then Squeezelite-X is a must-have: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/squeezelite-x/
And if you think the interface looks old - then get the material skin (it is just a checkbox on the add-ons page in LMS) https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material
The "Squeezer" remote works very well for Android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.org.ngo.squ...
Ten years ago, Sonos was the sine qua non of easy home audio, becuase they were ahead of the game on interface AND gave you a great way to access your music library anywhere in your house. The extra bonus feature was their usage of a proprietary mesh network, so the music didn't stream over your increasingly-overburdened regular wifi network.
Well, most of those advantages have kinda gone away. Moving in reverse:
- wifi is way better now; I never have dropouts anymore.
- The Sonos interface is now way, way, way behind the Apple music interface IMO. My nontechnical wife never warmed to Sonos at all, but she can use iTunes on her phone with aplomb, and playing music in the living room uses the same interface as playing music on her headphones.
- Library access was a sticking point, given that Apple formerly relied on a convoluted approach here, but by subscribing to Apple Music the problem is completely sidestepped. I pay for this mostly so I don't ever have to plug my phone into the media box and sync files -- for me or for my wife. That's worth the price right there, to be honest, but in addition to that you get access to nearly anything. It's rare I can't find what I want there. (We DO still buy CDs locally, but only because we live in a place with a real indie record store.)
The tl;dr is that we were already kind of Done with Sonos when this whole kerfluffle started -- we have sunk costs here, but as these devices stop functioning we'll move to something else that plugs into the Apple infrastructure better. Even if we have to revert to local music only due to some Apple failure, there are still better/easier options than Sonos at this point.
What's with companies dictating what we can do with our stuff when it's EoL?
People who buy this shit: Stop buying it and they'll stop forcing it on us!
Please... just stop.
NSFW tag, my friend.
Telling customers to just send the bricked device to the local recycling centre in exchange for a discount seems fair.
Apple also has a trade-in program except they expect you to send them the device. Sonos took the cheaper approach by offloading the actual recycling to a local centre. But people want to have it both/all three ways: feel good about recycling, get a discount on a future new gadget and sell/give the functioning old device to somebody. Amazing.
Side note: will there now be a market for buying used Sonos devices dirt cheap just for the discount in buying new devices? Or will Sonos only offer this on the first sale.
There are extra costs with doing this in house (or, I guess, by partnering with a recycling centre) which meant the discount would have been much lower, or perhaps close to 0.
But for an existing customer that did want to trade in, 30% was perhaps acceptable.
No, that's literally insane by every definition of the word. They took perfectly fine, working products, and destroyed them in order to give their customers a discount. Which part of that seems "fair" to you? Imagine if a car manufacturer would give you a discount on a new car, if you took your old one to the scrapyard first - everyone would immediately how this is a huge waste of resources if the car was still working. How is this acceptable with speakers??
Other companies somehow manage without this madness fine - if you are verified as an actual customer, they give you a discount for more stuff. What usually happens then is that you either sell or give away the old device, and someone else might get into the brand and potentially purchase more devices from it as well. It's a win win for everyone. This stupid recycling thing serves no one, except like you said - people feeling "good" about recycling, which is nonsense, a fully working device should be reused first.
This is pretty standard in Italy, nevertheless bricking devices is shit.
There is a difference between bricking a device and offering a trade-in program, or offering a trade-in programm. The former does not allow you to continue using a PURCHASED device (your property), the latter allows you to continue using your property or OPTING for the trade-in programm. Sonos didn't kill the devices without the customer OPTING for the purchase of a new one. I guess it's kind of bad UX, but an offer to the customer.
From an environmental perspective its obviously bad. Bricking kills reuse in a second hand market and is an insentive to take working devices out of operation.
Yet, its not the first sketchy thing I remember hering about Sonos and I am glad I bought Teufel multimedia systems https://www.teufel.de who I have no recollection of pulling any of these moves.
Clunkers are generally functional machines. At least here they don't accept the clunker if you can't drive it in there.
There is no similar environmental incentive here.
Note that the didn't take anything. It was an offer between two parties.
Since they were going to dismantle the obsolete tech anyhow, they just allowed consumers to send them to the local recycling centre (it's debatable if this part was fair). But since they wanted to make sure these things actually do get recycled, they bricked the devices that the consumer said not to need anymore and agreed to recycle.
What people wanted was a 30% discount for existing users. They got this, in the name of being green. A true win-win-win.
This move just teached other companies not to try similar stunts. Just let the devices die of old age, sit for a while in a drawer and let the consumer figure out what to do with the e-trash... using the local recycling centre or worse.
Wouldn't even that existing owners use them?
The discount in this case is an incentive against the best possible type of recycling, which is precisely to let someone else reuse it as is. Of course, companies tend to hate the good kind of recycling because it limits their profits. Companies are not entitled to infinite growth, nor should we facilitate that sort of expectation, least we end up destroying our own habitat. Well, we probably will, considering the way things are going...
What is actually amazing is that a company would create such an incentive and then pretend to be the good guys, caring about recycling and so on. Even more amazing is that some people are convinced by such low-effort bullshit.
I didn't see a mob asking for 30% higher prices so Sonos could actually do proper recycling.
The two offenses are very non-equal and not remotely equatable. One is claiming to help the environment while doing something actively detrimental to it, the other is at most not going for a non-existant hypothetical option which resembled someone trying to sell them the Brooklyn bridge and added sales sleeze. If that caught on without some through and validated accreditation method would rapidly see fly by night "recycling surplus" operations that ran off with the money without any actual recycling.
> The two offenses are very non-equal and not remotely equatable.
Both sides are pretending to want to be eco-conscious while buying/selling more hardware.
> One is claiming to help the environment while doing something actively detrimental to it
I'd say something neutral to it as they are promoting recycling. Maybe detrimental as encouraging e-waste but all hardware sellers want you to upgrade so e-waste is part of the modern tech industry. How long does a modern smart phone last?
> the other is at most not going for a non-existant hypothetical option which resembled someone trying to sell them the Brooklyn bridge and added sales sleeze.
No, the other is wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Which after much scandal, they did!
> If that caught on without some through and validated accreditation method would rapidly see fly by night "recycling surplus" operations that ran off with the money without any actual recycling.
In the end it was Sonos that did offer a discount, so they couldn't run with any money. It's actually the consumers that decided the deal was not good enough so now they keep the old device and get the money.