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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Sonos speakers. I got a big system during COVID and it got me through isolation. But then they decided to redo the app and the new one is terrible (not that the old one was ever great; software is not their strength). It's still a buggy mess to this day. Some of the hardware died too, and they don't offer repairs. Their customer service sucks too. You can't email them anymore and you have to wait hours on the phone.

I went from loyal supporter to wanting to get rid of the whole system. Buyer beware. Company has really gone downhill. I wish they'd fire the CEO.

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Sonos were originally great, when they were a platform to injest your music and stream to your various rooms.

That was years ago, and now they want to own the whole thing, from music to speakers, and are willing to brick old devices to force you onto more isolating versions of their app.

I'm very glad I never switched to them (was close when Logitech killed squeezebox), and would not recommend them to anyone for any reason.

I have to agree with this. The software was always serviceable before the new app. I have a Sonos speaker in my kids’ rooms that we often use for audiobooks and lullabies.

Even with the latest version of the new app, when I play something on both speakers, there is a delay from seconds up to a minute before sound comes through the second speaker, they play at wildly different random volumes each time, playing Audible books within the Sonos app no longer works, Airplay won’t connect about 30% of the time, and sometimes they just decide not to work at all for no apparent reason.

Every night I fight the urge to throw them in the bin. I’m contemplating replacing them but don’t know enough about alternatives yet.

Got a Sonos One for free when I bought a new phone once.

So many issues with setting it up with WiFi. Gave up and used an ethernet cable.

It's absolutely useless without a network connection, as it lacks bluetooth. You can't use it as a speaker for a Windows machine, only for MacOS (using AirPlay). I only use it for Spotify.

Wouldn't ever buy any of their stuff.

I've had a bit of Sonos gear: A Play:1, a Bridge, and a fancy jog-wheel remote that I forget the marketing name of.

They deliberately bricked the jog-wheel remote around a decade ago. ("We aren't just not going to support these anymore; we're actually going to remote-brick every single one of them.")

Upgrading the Play:1 to S2 broke the Bridge. (It wasn't bricked, but it was incompatible with their S2 and thus became useless to me; they didn't care.)

Lately, the Play:1 has distortion in the woofer. Sounds like normal audio stuff; a torn surround, maybe. I don't know how to open it to even do a visual inspection.

At 0/3, I've got a lot to complain about with Sonos.

But the one thing I'm not complaining about is how it worked (when it worked): It is a networked loudspeaker, with network datagrams on one side and audible music on the other side. Once music is playing (started by an app or computer software or UPNP or whatever), it continues to play that music all on its own.

It continues to play music if I take my phone and wander off, or take a call, or if I reboot my PC. It lets someone else control the music that is playing. Other than control, one or more Sonos speakers comprise a standalone system that is dependent only upon having the network behave.

I have a very effective LAN in my house, just as I have also had in other living situations. That's an advantage and I want to use it.

I definitely don't want things like this to be burdened with Bluetooth's problems.

>It is a networked loudspeaker, with network datagrams on one side and audible music on the other side. Once music is playing (started by an app or computer software or UPNP or whatever), it continues to play that music all on its own.

This has been my experience, too, as long as you don't touch it. Using the controls to skip a song has caused issues before, as well as unpausing after you've paused it for a while.

That said, most of those problems have been solved by just using ethernet instead of WiFi. Even with my access point being 1~2m away, I've had connectivity issues.

I wouldn't throw it away nor sell it, as it works fine when it does work.

I hear you.

I generally always had good results with my regular wifi, but I had more-predictable results with a Bridge (which just produces a dedicated 801.11 "SonosNet" network), when that device still worked for me.

When I occasionally installed Sonos professionally (a long time ago), we always installed a Bridge into a system or made sure that one Sonos endpoint/speaker was plugged into Ethernet by design. In doing so, this allowed the Sonos-widgets to form their own meshed wifi network that generally behaved just fine.

(And no, none of that is quite ideal.

These days I'm mostly divorced from Sonos. But I sometimes have issues with my various Google Home and Alexa devices that connect with wifi. To combat this, I also plug my old-school tiny-ass Chromecast Audio into an Ethernet adapter, as well as the CCwGTV on my main BFT. I do this just to be sure, because having consistent audio is very important to me, and it does work.

But these devices don't make their own mesh like Sonos can do. [Well, maybe Alexa devices can if combined with an Eero router to steer the whole ship, but I don't want that at all.])

I bought the cheap IKEA variant and it uses the same crappy software. I once spent a couple of hours adapting a new device into the system.. in the end I had to flash it first and setup everything from scratch. I will not buy any more devices.

Also I don't understand why they can't play sound from any android device since I can make a radio station on Linux and stream audio to it. I mean playing podcasts on the Sonos speakers would be great..

Their software stack is just terrible. Even after multiple resets, many of their devices would not work. Some of their error screens are secretly stateful too, requiring you to do the same thing 4-5x before it'll let you try an alternative workaround (which will sometimes work). The old app was mediocre, but predictably so, and you could usually work around issues with the community's help. The new app is so bad and unstable that half the time server issues will prevent you from being able to finish setup even if you do everything right. It's aggravating.

The FOSS Soundsync used to work with Sonos speaker but I think they blocked them: https://github.com/geekuillaume/soundsync

A friend of mine built his own clone using Raspberry Pis and generic speakers and that works way better than the Sonos stack.

That's the way to go... I guess I always knew, in the back of my head, that a proprietary cloud app was a bad idea... I just didn't think it would get THIS bad. I thought the company would work to protect their reputation and users, especially after they already had at least one similar debacle in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonos#Controversies). I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Just did a CTRL-F to find this. I fell for the shiny marketing and thought Sonos had a great reputation. The app is bad, the native voice control is bad, and Alexa doesn't work properly for me (cannot get it to drive Spotify no matter what I do).

We really need a hero on the inside to drop the code

The way I understand it, the employees "yelled" and "screamed" to not launch the app because it wasn't ready: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/it-was-the-wrong-dec...

Leadership ignored them, launched the app anyway, lost a ton of their stock value, and then laid off 100 employees.

I dunno wtf the board was doing at the time, but they should've removed the leader, rolled back the update, apologized to everyone and then worked to rebuild the experience and trust from the ground up. They never bothered with that, instead doubling down on the new app, keeping the CEO, and gradually restoring features. It still hasn't reached feature (or stability) parity with how it was a few years ago. I barely ever use my system anymore because it's so bad. (I really should sell it, but I just don't even want to touch the software to reset it, or try to support the buyer if they run into setup issues... which they will... because it's that bad.)

Apparently they're trying to make some changes with adding advisory boards, etc. But that won't help if leadership doesn't change. It was arrogance that brought them this mess, and the same people are still in charge. https://www.audioholics.com/news/sonos-backpedals https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/sonos-pledges-ch...

Empty promises from people we don't trust is not a way to win back loyalty. It's just lame PR damage control that fools nobody. They've been doing that for months now and the system is still half broken. Every week I run into issues and I've stopped trying to even report them anymore. RIP. I used to love my Move so much =/ At least that will keep working in Bluetooth mode... I hope.

Never going to buy a smart speaker system again. Dumb old cables is the way to go.

> Never going to buy a smart speaker system again. Dumb old cables is the way to go.

Most things with "smart" in the name are never worth the investment.

The audio sync is really hard to get right on homemade setups (I tried).

Sonos really sucks at software, but they get that right. And the speakers are good quality.

Have you tried recently? I’ve been playing with music-assistant, snapcast, and shairport-sync on some raspberry pi zeros. Synchronization has seemed to work incredibly well during my experiments.

Sonos syncs things up well-enough that a pair of them can be used in stereo. The stereo pair will play in-phase (allowing for imaging like with conventional stereo rigs), and stay locked together even as devices are added and removed to/from a group.

Do DIY solutions accomplish this?

There are zero audio sync issues between speakers all wired to the same receiver. You can get an input cable that connects to a headphone jack to make an iPhone resemble a CD player input on the back of the receiver. Also need an apple dongle for phones w/o headphone jacks.

The very mild inconvenience of using different speakers in different rooms to me is very tolerable vs. the horrible experience with my Sonos speaker deciding to stop working or can't connect, forcing updates, etc. when I just want some chill vibe background music.

For me it was more about the cables than the smart features.

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