Heartbroken by the Sonos App Disaster and What's Happened to the Company
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I dont think it was a good product even back when it did 'work'. We received a pair as a house-warming gift and I remember not understanding how or why I should use them. I already had a soundbar that I could stream music to. I now, out of politeness, had to use these new "wireless" speakers that demanded a constant wifi connection but still required their own Very Visible power cables along with its own dedicated app which was nothing but a wrapper for music services that logged me out after every software update. I couldn't even use it as a dumb speaker and operate it as part of my main sound system so now I have a soundbar that is nicely mounted to the wall and additionally these speakers that clutter my living room. Lovely.
Being able to listen to the show on the tv while in the bathroom or shower is nice. Means we don’t have to pause shows if we don’t want to for breaks.
Having music playing across the whole home during dinner parties is a nice vibe.
A whole house alarm would probably be nice for families on the same schedule.
The concept of Sonos is really nice and it mostly works, but yeah the new app was rough. Not sure if I’ll buy anymore sonos gear. For a long time they were the only ones that had the tech required to stream to multiple devices in sync. I’m not sure what the other options are now
I don't have a house or Sonos speakers, but I can see how some people would want that experience.
I really do not understand this feature. If I want to listen to music without headphone, I'm going to sit down in front of my stereo where sound is best.
However here it is used as a simple figure of speech rather than literally: the neighbours don't like to lrave anything unfilled with sound.
I suppose the neighbours are of the sort, like many seemingly, who cannot tolerate silence.
It could be a cool feature, it is just a lot if work to get setup and it would only work if you are the only one in the house
Or, as you said, perhaps I don’t have a big enough house nor do I need to listen to music 24x7 or have it follow me.
In the end I use it so sparingly (social gatherings) owners of detached homes without shared walls, could save the money and time and just turn up the volume.
That said, as always, YMMV
I love my tech stuff, and I've got home assistant doing the lights, but it never once crossed my mind to mess with the sound system, except for occasional hifi upgrades. Eg next up: run a subwoofer cable from the stereo amp to the kitchen, but I'm in no rush.
I have the same experience - my home runs seven Logitech (formerly Slim Devices) “squeezebox” players from a home server with a ripped collection and options for Spotify. The networked players either have their own speaker, or are connected to amp/speakers. In practice almost all of our music plays through these devices. It’s great.
The only time we connect multiple players to sync up is at larger parties, like once a year. It’s just one button press to do it, so not using this capability isn’t that it’s too complex, it just turns out not to be that useful to us.
The main use case for multi zone audio is handled by the A/B/A+B speaker setting on one particular amp.
As you say, YMMV.
It definitely was a bit of a process to set up, but well documented and much less painful than what this sounds like.
I also put headless plexamp on one, which lets me play my music from Plex, although I haven't gotten around to putting it on the other one yet for multi-room audio.
This has been a great example of how a company culture can go off the rails, and management can chase dubious ideas that sound good, like cloud mediated controls or a unified react native codebase, while a single dev can make something many times better by working off more pragmatic assumptions.
Airplay2 to my Apple TV and from the TV through to a “dumb” receiver and speakers works great, I would highly suggest that route for your main system. For me it’s the right balance between “just works” convenience and audiophile sound quality.
I posted elsewhere on this thread how the third party app Clic for Sonos has saved me. Might be worth a try before you go through the expense of changing over.
Logitech abandoned the ecosystem almost immediately after I started buying into it and I've worried what would happen but the open source community has made these things better than ever. Don't get me wrong, there have been teething issues with Spotify, breakages in service, and any new hardware is all a bit DIY, but I'm glad I chose the open solution.
The community is currently rebranding everything to Lyrion and you can get started without any official hardware. https://lyrion.org/
I'm okay with smart dongle-y things that don't fit the criteria so long as they could run on a set of passive speakers. Because if they turn to shit I just pitch them.
I'm not going to lie, the UX is kinda terrible compared to Sonos, but it means not paying Sonos, and it's functional. Not that Google hasn't done bad things in general, but in this area Sonos is the bad actor, which is why I chose this ecosystem despite the downsides.
That said I do dislike the new app rollout.
I do feel like there has been 500ms to 2 seconds of added lag in certain actions. I can't quite place what's going on though. Not enough to be a deal breaker yet.
I feel the surround sound experience has been very hit or miss but can't tell if it's Sonos or the media platform I'm watching videos on.
Originally they said the feature was totally supported but just didn't make the cut for the initial app release. I've heard that story before, including from my own PMs. Can't say I'm too surprised that the feature still isn't supported and I've yet to see any further mention of adding it back.
That having been said, I've been a longtime Sonos customer and have loved the experience until this disaster. Unlike other commenters in this thread, my family has loved the ease of use and ability to move music between rooms and add / remove speakers. We also have our record player hooked-up with the Sonos Bridge. I don't want to run a server, and it would be an absolute nightmare to hardwire my house. I hope they get it figured out, I'm not throwing away my speakers but it'll be years before I make a new Sonos purchase (if ever).
I live in a small place and only have a couple original Sonos 1's. Even then we usually only have one playing. I'm just going to sell both and get a similarly small speaker with an Aux input, it'd be just as convenient for me to plug in a phone and stream music from either Spotify or our home server.
> Alarm functionality as a highlight feature wtf, dude I can write bash scripts that handle alarm systems reliably on an IoT network, NO PROBLEM … Queue logic systems are the most basic shit I've ever seen. Are you serious?
I don’t know what to make of this.
While the app may be a disaster claiming alarms are nothing more than a bash script on a distributed IOT system seems odd.
Networked queues with multiple clients is not as simple as the author implies either.
Ah yes, of course, the most honest opinions come from the hugest of fans. But in all seriousness: I will make fun of every single person who will show this level (or less) of emotional attachment to any tech. It's literally "victim of product and an abusive relationship with company".