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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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
> 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!
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 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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Please stop putting salespeople in charge of highly technical product companies like Sonos. I'm so glad that Tom Conrad is an engineer by training. I hope he can turn this mess around.
The key technical change that broke Sonos was abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS, while also shifting from direct device communication to a cloud-based API approach. This new architecture made all network traffic encrypted and routed through Sonos cloud servers (even for local operations), adding significant overhead and latency, especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power. They also switched from native platform-specific UX frameworks to a JavaScript-based interface while moving music service interactions through their cloud instead of direct SMAPI calls, resulting in slower performance and reduced functionality.
For a more extended discussion, see this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Pennell, a principal engineer at Microsoft with a deep technical understanding of Sonos systems. He created one of the most successful third-party Sonos apps for Windows Phone and worked directly with Sonos on their official Windows Phone 8 app.
I don't think having a sales person in charge was the problem.
The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.
I have experienced this most acutely with the most recent round of macOS and iOS updates.
Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion.
I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.
Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.
> but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.
all it takes to install Windows 11 without an account is to press SHIFT + F10 on the "Connect your internet"-screen and execute this command: OOBE\BYPASSNRO
never in my life have i linked an MS-Account to my personal windows, i always use a local account.
We're on a tech-focused site where someone mentioned that they don't install windows, because they don't want to login with an online-account. i agree that my described work-around is not made for the common enduser and i hate that this feature is so hidden, but i think executing a single command you find after 30 seconds of googling is not too much to ask for from a tech-adjacent person :)
i see posts on here of people reverse-engineering firmwares, hacking together new things, finding and using exploits etc., not sure why installing a windows seems to be a huge topic, then.
it’s actually not even as “simple” as that comment they’ve changed it to be a bit more obtuse to get to the command part, exemplifying exactly why going along with it is a problem.
At what point in time were “kids today” into computers? If it wasn’t phones, it was video games or comic books or serial Dickens. It’s always been a subset who want to play with the tech beneath.
sibling, we are on _hacker_ news. if a single command is too much to ask for, i don't know what to think.
ever installed Linux? takes exponentially more knowledge than this windows-local-only workaround.
i'm sure that management is aware of this feature, as it exists for years now and can be trivially found, it's not like this is hidden somewhere in a vault, you know. Same as MAS.
i'm not even a defender of Windows and only use it at home because i game, but if i see that someone has never installed a windows just because they don't want to give M$ their e-mail address (hope they don't have a github or linkedin account, but, you know...), then i want to give them the hint they need :) i use them same functionality to install windows for my parents etc., as they want to have local-only accounts as well. even without this weird work-around, i would still be the one installing windows. OS installation is not hard, but already too difficult or confusing for lots of endusers.
not sure why you chose to reply in such a snarky tone :(
Microsoft knows about this. Its why they included the option in the command line. The fact that Massgavel's activation scripts still work on windows is telling of how much they'll care.
I did not know that, thanks. But still - if I have to research now how to do that it‘s still going in the wrong direction, no? Besides, it‘s rare that Apple gives a choice, usually you have to adapt at whatever they decide.
Bluetooth is horrible. I see spinning loader (connection indicator) even when I switch bluetooth off. It’s been stuck at it for days. You’d think that this would be core functionality and ultra stable by now.
Mail has been terrible since inception. It’s just more terrible now. Photos in iOS 17 was fantastic but the new version in iOS 18 is unforgivably bad. It’s the new “pc load letter”…
Mail got category buttons on top that split your inbox so now to check your mail you have to click around because shipping notification are in a separate list from work emails.
Photos had a perfectly fine interface with tabs that got changed into a long list of often redundant categories. Thankfully it can be customized a bit.
New control center (wifi toggles etc.) was replaced with a customizable grid of widgets that is buggy, slow and looks ugly and unprofessional in comparison with the old interface. Gimmick.
Home screen icon size and color is customizable now and it looks out of place. Gimmick.
If you have a dark theme enabled then icons in settings become themed and look different than icons on the home screen with is weird and inconsistent with the rest of the interface.
All animations were reworked and feel like crap. There is a delay to every action and it feels like animation smoothness takes priority over interface responsiveness. Home screen swiping animation stutters every time.
Even though there is not a single new feature available for EU users other than the interface changes the entire OS feels sluggish, bloated and unfinished.
Performance is terrible. This update made my iPhone 12 slow down to a crawl. Feels like running Vista on a Windows XP machine and since they dropped security updates for iOS 17 I had no choice but to upgrade. This combined with the recent news about iPhones listening to people at homes makes me want to get rid of my phone entirely. I don’t want a new iPhone and I sure as hell don’t want an Android.
It's called monopolization, and it's dependent on those companies selling products that you can't switch for another competitor.
Or, some times it's plain simple cartelization, making sure no competitor is better. That seems to be the case with smart TVs for example.
It's good to have a word for the impact it causes, but focusing on that novelty makes it looks like it's a new phenomenon that we don't know the causes or how to fix.
That is not in the OS. I also sort of suspect they're being hired as a prank because there is basically no power structure for them to have control over anything. Execs and designers have all the power.
(Note: there are "EPMs" but it's a totally different thing.)
> The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds
I haven’t owned Sonos gear in a long time, but certainly back in the day they had just amazing products. That SUB where it was so perfectly balanced? They did a demo (that you could easily reproduce at home) where you could have it driving “call the cops” noise disturbance bass without upsetting a nickel set lengthwise on top, just a great unit and not the only one. Awesome stuff.
But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”.
For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago.
Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.
I think you're underselling the technical complexity of doing what Sonos did. It was a pretty impressive feat for them to do what they did over WiFi. The reason your Google Home can do it is because, while it's a pretty decent technical challenge, it's not insurmountable, and Google decided that the price tag Sonos put on themselves was more expensive then Google dedicating a reasonable quantity of their highly talented engineering staff to recreate the technology.
I think that's the kicker. It was revolutionary when it came out, and it's a solid technical solution, but Sonos was novel over a decade ago.
Every novel invention becomes commodity over time. The issue is that, instead of trying to invent something new, they’re adding gimmicks and present it as growth.
True, but as the comment a few above mentions, “we demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.” Why even grow at all once you’ve achieved a great networked speaker? If the product is mature, everything after is gimmicks especially weighed against user satisfaction, the ultimate goal.
The market has matured, but as of a year ago, there isn't another solution that I could drop in that could replace my SONOS system. SONOS is so far ahead and had to establish themselves by solving for so many fringe use cases that they are generally the only ones who have things like the connect:amps to bridge wired outdoor speakers and architectural in-ceiling/in-garden speakers within the same ecosystem
I'm sure that at some point, Samsung or Google or Sony or some upstart will catch up, but it will be a long time before someone eliminates SONOS from contention despite this multi-year setback
HEOS-capable gear from Marantz and Denon cover a lot of the applications you referenced. I decided I would never buy another Sonos product after the S2 rollout, and I now have a mix of eleven Denon and Marantz receivers driving both built-in, freestanding, and outdoor speakers of my choice all over my house.
HEOS is amazing for the size of the dev team, which I think is a couple folks somewhere in a large garage in Minnesota[0]. The amount of things they never touch is amazing. I appreciate the stability - my HEOS 1 speaker is still working, streaming tunein and tidal without issues - but when it comes to the app, it's borderline stagnation at this point.
They had a fairly unique and high-quality product in the early days.
It just did’t evolve very far or very fast, or even adapt pricing to better fit a rapidly changing market.
They switched away from a focus on multi-room hi-fi (or at least mid-fi) audio and users with their own hoard of digital audio to focus more on streaming services and chase the trend of little monophonic speakers. The higher-end devices remained good but became ever more niche.
Then they broke everything, particularly customer trust, with the app update.
Heh, this thread reminded me that I own Sonos speakers that I haven't used in several years because at some point they updated and I needed to install an app or make an account or something to use them and never did.
So while it's maybe neat that they solved fringe use cases, it's unfortunate that they failed at the basic use case of "just easily play audio from my phone"
You can always short SONO. It'll probably muddle along for 5+ more years until someone buys it up for the brand name. There just isn't the market for their speakers that there used to be.
That's a general rant against publically traded companies. I'm specifically asking about the original posters take that a company that makes speakers specifically shouldn't be publicly traded. Like it sounded like they thought a speaker company couldn't be big enough to be on NASDAQ or something?
> For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
The reason is tax law and it applies to all companies not just tech. Removing the double-taxation of dividends would fix so much of our economy.
If you run a stable, no-growth but profitable company, and each year return the profits to the owners (shareholders) in the form of a dividend, that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.
If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.
We could avoid a lot of the boom-bust cycles, enshittification of products and other economic problems if we just structured tax law to encourage stable, profitable companies issuing boring predictable dividends instead of our current system that requires infinite growth.
>that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.
Why is that bad? The first case is income to the corporation and they pay income tax on it. The second is income to the shareholder and they pay income tax on it. How is it different from the corporation's employees paying income tax on money received from the corporation?
>If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.
That's true as long as the shareholders never sell their shares. Once they do, it's a taxable event like the dividend.
> How is it different from the corporation's employees paying income tax on money received from the corporation
The money paid to employees is only taxed once.
We (pretty much everywhere) tax companies on their profits, but individuals on their income. It seems unfair, it leads to some weird but accepted inequalities (like the cost of renting a house vs buying), but no alternative seems to work.
Or tax sale of shares the same so there is no loophole and you can either spend it on something useful or lower taxes for everyone instead of just for shareholders.
This is nonsense because companies can and do replace dividends with share buybacks.
While sometimes criticized as "executives juicing the stock price because that's what their incentives are tied to", in fact investors recognise that buybacks are economically equivalent to dividends, but tax-advantaged (for exactly the reasons you gave, they don't create a taxable event for the shareholders).
One problem with buybacks is it's socially difficult for companies to replace dividends with buybacks - by convention, dividends are usually issued on a regular schedule and buybacks are ad-hoc, so "cutting dividends" is seen as a sign of a company that no longer has reliable profits. But that really is just convention and it would only take a few companies switching to normalize this.
> For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
That reason is people like more money than less money. No one logs into their brokerage account and invests in Sonos because they have a great product that is growing (or shrinking) at the rate of the speaker market.
People want to see their year end report at least equal the broad market returns.
The directive for all business leaders is to hit those benchmark returns, not pump out a solid speaker for however many years.
And if a private business owner operates their company in a way that lags the market’s returns, then they are basically doing charity work. They’re going to have to pay a lot of cash compared to their competitors who can use RSUs to incentivize employees.
Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon.
Clearly everyone likes money. We could pay them for good things rather than the transient illusion of good things.
Yes it would be imperfect. No it wouldn’t be worse than this mess. Bell Labs didn’t invent the transistor on this model, JFK didn’t send us to the moon on this model.
This “privatize the commons of a century of effective public/private partnership” model is going rather shit in fact.
>Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon.
Every publicly listed business already does this, in the form of stock grants and options with various targets to hit at various intervals. See bottom of page 51 for an example:
It’s where all those rage bait headlines of extreme executive compensation come from, from maturing equity granted before the stock appreciated a good amount over the course of a few years.
There is absolutely no basis for the sweeping, extraordinary claim that “every publicly listed business” is managed and incentivized around sustainable long-term value.
I hate to be aggressive but it’s really pretty godawful that people let absurd, corrosive claims like this fly. There is a creeping normalcy to weird Art Laffer talking points and weird Milton Friedman Freak Offs with no evidence. Things suck for the typical person since Dick Cheney and Art Laffer started “cutting taxes”.
You’re wrong in a way that demands a complete ignorance of everything from news to history to human empathy.
This mindset needs fucking therapy and where therapy fails the legal system for a fucking change.
> Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon.
This is not
> There is absolutely no basis for the sweeping, extraordinary claim that “every publicly listed business” is managed and incentivized around sustainable long-term value.
There has been plenty of research into figuring out how executive compensation can be tied to longer term performance, but “sustainable long term value” is such a nebulous term, I have no idea what it could mean other than a fantasy where people are able to magically measure everything they want.
I only meant to highlight the fact that it is standard practice at publicly listed businesses to hire consultants whose job it is to figure out how to align executives and reward them for achieving long term goals.
Maybe you think the current timetables are not long term enough, or the measures are not correct, but it’s not as if cash is being handed out Willy nilly.
NVIDIA is posting profit margins up there with the Dutch East India Company (check it) on the back of the “agents” that are about to obsolete not just programmers specifically but white collar workers generally.
We’re handing out trillions in cap for press releases.
What on God’s green earth the fuck are you talking about?
Willy nilly? Will Wonka with a chocolate factory is closer to earth.
And NVidia is pretty much a monopoly in its field like the VoC was, only not legally bound. But the AI boom is pretty much a tulip mania at this point so I would hedge my bets.
But Sonos doesn't sell any services/subscriptions, just products, correct? So even if they wanted to have recurring revenue how would they do it? They sell gadgets?
They sell "Sonos Radio HD", a subscription based radio service which is supposed to be an upgrade from their free offering.
But as much as I dislike the "new" app, it doesn't push subscribing to this service, so I'm not sure they absolutely want device customers to become subscribers.
I'm sure it's one of the biggest questions asked by the Sonos C-suite: how do we get recurring revenue or make the moat wider. But that goes for every product company in the world.
As a music fan one would think I'd be their target group. But I haven't even considered their product and classified it as "some smart crap that is an excuse to syphon data out and lock me in". So all stick, no carrot.
It never really was that at the beginning. It was a good, locally-controlled system which would build itself a wifi mesh (back when that was unheard of) be configured to pick up things like samba/cifs shares and play your library, with some really neat features like combining speakers into stereo pairs or surround systems, and then playing your music and any input devices arbitrarily across these zones you have set up.
At some point they integrated spotify and other similar services, which risked what you talked about, but was fine. There are even third party controller frontends available on linux.
But recently (mid 2024) they delivered an absolute stinker of a new app which routes everything via their cloud, fails to load half the time, barely responds, and looks suspiciously like that grab for control you imagine
Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs.
Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business.
A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase.
If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs.
Why do you say that? My gut reaction is that the opposite is true. Salespeople must understand their customers' wants and needs in order to effectively sell! Engineers are generally a step or two removed from the customers. This may be an unpopular take on HN but I'd wager the people who spend time directly with the customers have a better chance at understanding what they want. Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!
I'd go as far as to say that the role doesn't matter, it's the attitude of the individual.
I've worked with a few developers AND sales people that didn't give a hoot about what their customers thought. In the case of Sales, they only cared about making their targets. In the case of the devs that didn't care, they spent 99% of their time doing silly (in my opinion) arguments about frameworks, design patterns, and whitespace and formatting rules in CI. Not that things like design patterns are inherently silly. But if they don't result in a better customer experience (via more stable and maintainable software, for example), then it's a waste of time.
I'm a developer by trade but have ALWAYS had an attitude of "it only matters if it's useful to the user" – and have butted heads sometimes with developers on which features to prioritize.
> Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!
People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. Not many people call up to say how well something works. I would agree with you though on good Salespeople (ones that do try to understand what customers need and all that, not necessarily ones that sell the most) knowing what the customer wants/needs.
> People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action.
I used to see this all the time at an old job where my team worked on open source client libraries for using the main product that our company sold. A decent number people seemed to think that an increasing number of tickets being filed against one of the libraries was a sign that users weren't happy with it, but it always seemed obvious to me that you couldn't easily conclude that; you might have 99 happy users with no issues for every 1 unhappy user who filed a ticket, or you might have literally only unhappy users and nobody without issues. On the other hand, getting literally zero tickets might mean that you have plenty of happy users, or it might mean you have basically no users at all.
I'd often talk to younger engineers who were interning on the team or recently joined full-time about how this dynamic informed how I approached my job; usually, we'd only hear from users who had issues, so the "goal" in some ways to was to make the software so good that you'd never hear from them. If you did hear from a user, that was a valuable opportunity where you might learn something you could do in the future to make things better the first time.
> so the "goal" in some ways to was to make the software so good that you'd never hear from them.
Yes. There are people who talk about product experiences that delight or whatever. Nah, the ultimate experience is one that's so flawless, so frictionless that it's completely forgettable. The user doesn't want to remember anything. They have a problem a/o need, the goal is to make it disappear w/out a trace.
In my experience it's more like customer-facing people, sales and support, get to know the customers needs and pain points, while good technical people knows the limitations and possibilities of the systems involved. By working together the sum can be greater than the parts.
As a dev I strive to talk to sales and support for this reason. It's not seldom I can do a small change that drastically improves the user experience for one or more clients, be it existing or potential.
Too many developers only focus on the specifications, and don’t try to understand the specifications by trying to understand the user. Instead they complain that product owners, product managers, designers, or analysts fail to give the proper specifications. I don’t see many developers really trying to understand their users. But this may be different per domain…
> the people who spend time directly with the customers
Unless engineers spend time directly with customers, something is broken in the organization to begin with. If salespeople and customers dream up solutions and then hand the task to produce this solution over to engineers, then that business is frankly doomed.
Your gut reaction is something salespeople play off of. I've been in the sales position before, handling the people in charge of making the purchasing decision, selling them bells and whistles they absolutely didn't need, but giving them the emotional satisfaction of a "successful" transaction, leaving with a sense of victory, that translated into a strong relationship and many years of repeat sales, with incremental upselling over time.
Good sales, ethical sales, aren't parasitic. A vast majority of sales in todays markets, especially in enterprise markets, are parasitic. The salespeople are interchangeable. The ones that make the most money are the ones most willing to be parasitic. The sales script is targeted and tailored to the intended audience, which in most large companies, is several degrees of separation from the eventual user of the product. You don't need to know what the end user needs. You need to know what the person in charge of buying wants, and that's ultimately emotional validation, hope, a sense of "innovating", a feeling of victory in pricing negotiations, being respected and treated well, and so forth. You can run them through the wringer with sales engineers and migrations after the contract is signed, and even if the end user and the product engineers recognize that your product is the wrong tool for the job, that won't matter if the buying manager is emotionally satisfied with the transaction. People will bend over backwards to justify what they know is "right."
A salesperson CEO will make more money, but will make the world a shittier place, because they're the cotton candy of management. They'll burn credibility and reputation in exchange for profit, kick the can down the road for someone else to clean up the mess later.
Sure, in a healthy, respectable, ethical, functional company, you'd be right, and the CEO would also be the best salesperson for the product, because they'd know it, and the customers, inside and out, and be able to explain and demonstrate exactly what was necessary and why, and justify all the costs and benefits.
This is a world that has Goodharted the measure of success - profit - and empowered people in the execution of shitty behavior. The market rewards higher profits and punishes "failures," often completely out of sync with quality and merit.
We don't live in a good world - companies that behave like you describe would be wonderful. We live in a thoroughly enshittified world, and a whole lot of people "earning" a whole lot of money are in between you and any meaningful change.
From Apple and Microsoft on down, companies want endless, infinitely increasing returns year over year, and they will do anything that isn't explicitly illegal to get it. They'll also do illegal things if the cost of getting caught is less than the profit earned. Alignment with end user needs, benefit to the consumer - these are far down the list of things meaningful to the systems and people making decisions on how money is spent. The job of a salesperson is to understand that system, and exploit it for the benefit of their company.
Not sure if I agree with an engineer inherently being better here.
The ideal case is having leadership who uses the product, or at least is willing to walk in the shoes of an end-user. Plenty of engineers do not do this either.
Anecdotally, having worked at multiple small-medium companies with a variety of leadership backgrounds, the worst have been sales background. Engineering backgrounds have ranged from OK to great.
- I knew nothing about what the healthcare industry needed in the three SaaS companies I worked for including software for health care workers dealing with special needs kids
- the various “enterprises” mostly in the edtech or state and local government space in consulting.
No, the person running the company has expertise running companies. Customer understanding lies with designers, analysts, product owners, product management, but also sales: what is the pain we’re addressing, how can ensure the customers really understands the consequences of not addressing the pain, how can we ensure the customer sees our product is the best to address their pain.
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs.
There's no reason to believe an engineer would understand the customer needs more than a salesperson. I know a lot of engineers who would do literally anything to avoid dealing with a real customer. At the companies I've worked for, engineers don't even talk to customers if there isn't a specific, technical issue they need to be there for. Meanwhile, salespeople actually talk to customers, probably more than anyone except support.
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs.
I think you have that backwards. Sales people absolutely need to understand what they customer wants and needs, or they won't buy it. Engineers just know what they want to build because it's what they want.
But really, Product Managers are the ones who are in the best position to figure it out. They get input from sales, customer service, and engineering, and produce competitive research, and then prioritize from there.
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs.
I assume you are an engineer? I am too, not judging :-).
Everybody tends to think that they are in a better position to know how the product should look like, I think it's a normal bias.
Not that salespeople are better. I hate the direction Sonos chose. Just saying that engineers are not always the best at understanding what customers want and need (if you asked me, I would say that everybody needs Yubikeys, and yet people actively fight to keep their right to reuse the same weak password everywhere :-) ).
In all disciplines you find more not so brilliant people than truly brilliant people. I am a software engineer, but it happens that I cannot understand how our UX professionals have designed our product's UI. Or if I understand it I find it awkward. Now you could say that's because I am so much below average, that I am a hopeless case... But we get customer reports that they are more confused than I am. So having UX people is not silver bullet.
I think the solid understanding of the product and its users is the important part, not whether you’re an engineer or not. That understanding (or lack thereof) can and does transcend role.
> abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS
I don’t know about that part. UPnP is exactly the HTTP-abusing XML-laden layer-spanning horrorshow you expect from 2000s Microsoft where it was mainly supported, mDNS is a fairly compact and neat set of independent extensions to preexisting Internet protocols born during Apple’s short period of flirting with open standards. In a greenfield project, you’d need to show me some really impressive tooling to make me choose UPnP, because five minutes with the specs are enough to tell implementing or debugging the thing is going to be a nightmare.
(No experience with Sonos or their implementation of either.)
I had the same reaction, all the other parts of the parent comment sound bad but switching to mDNS seems like the one that should have been an improvement or at least neutral...
I'll second this. UPnP is wisely considered a bad idea and a security liability. mDNS usually just works and has been the foundation for several successful consumer platforms including Chromecast
UPnP generally or just UPnP IGD (frequently referred to as “UPnP” in consumer router UIs)? I’d imagine the primary reasons a smart speaker would want to use UPnP are largely unrelated to punching holes in firewalls and NATs (what IGD is about). And however distasteful RPC over XML over jury-rigged HTTP over IP multicast may be, it’s hardly inevitable that it must create a security problem.
Even if we’re speaking about holes, though, I feel like I must object to the broad description of that function as a security vulnerability, as any instance of that moves us that much farther away from a true peer-to-peer Internet.
Where are you getting reliable mDNS? I love the protocol on my own devices but good lord the Google Home ecosystem is terrible. Playing audio through multiple speakers at all, forget getting them in sync, is an exercise in frustration. And when I check by scanning mDNS it's always hung getting no responses from devices I know are there.
The literal Chromecast itself seems to be exceptional device that just works.
Been using mDNS for years in the Apple ecosystem. Never had issues, except maybe 5-6 years ago with AirDrop but been rock stable since. Using airdropping, sharing screens, printing, audio, all kinds.
But it wasn't just a move from UPnP to mDNS with everything else remaining the same. They also moved to HTTP/WebSocket instead of UPnP eventing, added encryption.
While most complaints in this thread about the app all say "it's sluggish", with the initial release of S2 many had their systems that worked perfectly fine with S1 undiscoverable with S2. At the time all the advice on Sonos forums, Reddit, etc was "First check your router and make sure mDNS isn't disabled". Which caused a lot of people to have a kneejerk reaction of "wtf is this mDNS shit and what was wrong with the "old reliable UPnP"
HTTP/WebSocket relies on a stateful connection! Man that strikes me as so not smart!
Comedically, UPnP was also HTTP, but not as stateful as websockets. Often httpu, http over UDP. And for service discovery, httpu over multicast, pretty much like mdns. I'm surprised that s2 would have broken, given that I'd expect s1 to also need multicast. Maybe Sonos setup a pinhole router via upnp-igd, so devices could talk to each other inside the network, even if multicast was off? It's be interesting to know if any upnp-igd rules were created in s1.
Ditching a native framework for something JS-powered and running everything thru a cloud server sounds like technical decisions willfully made by engineering leaders.
VSC is the least bad Electron app I’ve ever used, but (heavily subjective) it pales in comparison to Neovim + Tmux. It’s not even close.
Related: I was looking at WinRAR’s site last week after reminiscing about it with coworkers, and found that a. They haven’t really updated their UI since I last used it a decade+ ago b. The download is still 4 MB. THAT is why native is superior – if you know what you’re doing, you can get incredible performance with absurdly low filesizes.
Aside from the fact that it shouldn’t take hundreds of MB to launch the simplest of apps, and that it’s incredibly wasteful on its face? Memory. Where do you think those bytes end up when you launch it?
Because I need the space for videos and games and that's why I have large storage. Not for tiny applications wasting 300 MBs because someone thought that an electron app would reduce engineering cost.
I use VSC because some mature plugins only exist for VSCode, like Rust, and Microsoft pushing it for stuff like PowerShell, killing their ISE IDE.
And it only performs that well, because all critical code is written in a mix of C++ and Rust running in external processes, and they have ported text rendering into WebGL.
It's an interesting example, because the fact that it is js makes it trivial for most developers to make modifications to it by opening the Chrome DevTools. Even if you're not a js dev, you probably occasionally write some js.
I'm arguing that it's successful because any of its users can trivially hack something on top of it and distribute it, including things the original devs never intended or think is a good idea. In that way, its success mirrors Excel.
> From a documentation, examples, accessibility, tooling, and number of people you can get help from, JS wins
Maybe as a general purpose language, but for this specific comparison (extending editors). Elisp and Emacs wins. Vimscript is not the best plugin language, but the interation process is way better than VSC.
> Probably egged on by people telling them they had a much larger hiring pool if they went with JS (which is almost certainly true).
There are many VC funded companies here. How many of you felt pressured to pick a hireable language like JS/Python because if not you couldn't deploy your investor's capital? Like, if you had presented a plan of "I'm going to need 4 graybeards that know Haskell", you'd get denied for not thinking big enough.
Interestingly, Mercury [0] is VC-backed, and their backend is entirely Haskell. In an interview [1], their CTO mentions that it’s actually quite easy to hire for Haskell, as the demand is much lower than the supply, and, as he slyly puts it, “interest in Haskell acts as a decent proxy for baseline developer quality.”
So while the pool is larger for JS/TS and Python, that may not always be beneficial.
1Pass is a perfect example for my argument – v7 was amazing, and native. v8 has weird bugs, like refusing to open despite saying it’s working fine. As to memory, while I forget the consumption of v7, v8 looks to consume somewhere around 130 MB for the app, plus that again for a renderer helper or two, and then the browser extensions.
100+ MB for what is essentially an encrypted local DB with cloud sync and a GUI seems absurd.
That's an example of something that can be done well or done poorly.
AirBnB, UberEats and Facebook are all built with React Native and they have excellent performance.
Using a JS framework for your UI doesn't inherently mean it will suck. It can be done well.
If you expect it to be half as much work, you'll be disappointed.
If you expect it to be a tradeoff that makes some things easier and some things harder, and you're willing to invest in making it excellent, then it can be a very reasonable choice.
At least on iOS, the Facebook app is not and has never been built with RN. Some features were, but none of the core ones like News Feed. The biggest example of an RN-based feature is Marketplace.
It's not like the salesy-CEO was writing the code, there was still a bunch of engineers who said "hey this sounds like a great idea". Personally I want my CEOs to be on the sales side, make more money for the company. That being said you best have a good CTO/CIO that aren't sales-oriented.
Our company makes B2B for a rather technical niche.
We got a sales-oriented CEO who knows when to listen to us developers. It has worked very well for our company.
Being more sales-oriented he's found good business models and knows our customers well, and hence what our products are worth to our clients so we're not selling our products too cheap. This was the case before he took over from a more technical CEO.
While a CEO with an engineer background can certainly do well too, I think it's probably easier to find a good sales-based CEO that simply knows when to listen to their technical team. At least in theory...
I'm not sure any single one if those was necessarily problematic so much as the fact they did all of transitions at the same time and perhaps didn't do enough diligence in testing and slowly rolling out to ensure parity. For instance they could have rolled out mdns support with fallback to upnp and perhaps iterated untill they knew for a fact mdns was finding all the same devices as upnp with similar or better latency. However it seems that's not what they did.
mDNS is used by all the major players in the iot space today and there is a reason for it. For instance I believe Chromecast uses mDNS for discovery. Routers have had a long time to work through any possible issues. New code will always suffer from bugs and I'm pretty sure that's been one of the problems they face more than anything else.
> Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app.
That sure sounds like this was a deliberate choice.
That said, I suspect Sonos' market has mostly disappeared. A decade ago I paid $400+ to get streaming audio; now a lot of people are happy with Spotify Connect and $200 google speakers or a $50 refurb echo 4.
It sounds like a secondary effect. They made a whole ton of really bad design decisions that ruined the product for current hardware, with breaking compatibility with existing kit being icing on the cake.
The new mDNS discovery mechanism works much better for me than the old one. I had two speakers that would constantly require reboots to be discovered with the old version but now they are 100% available.
Nice article by Andy. It's astonishing that they released that magnitude of change, and that they didn't provide a way to roll back once it showed itself to be a car crash. It should have been an opt-in beta, then opt-out, and maybe then after the bugs are squashed, incrementally rolled out.
I understand why they'd to remove this big clatter of legacy protocols, simplify it, and encrypted everything. A tech-focused CEO would surely want that too, but perhaps might respect the amount of work and testing involved. What they forgot is that in a Sonos is a clatter of legacy protocols on top of speakers that are sonically "ok". Wasn't that their unique selling point? Why wouldn't a CEO with a sales background understand USP?
As someone pointed out: they want to turn once-off purchases into monthly subscription. Maybe. They see this enormous userbase and brainstorm ways to squeeze recurring revenue out of it, but ironically they ruin the product and turn an army of advocates into enemies.
Those would have been CTO decisions or at least recommendations as to the technical merits of the change, not the fault of the CEO.
Now if the CEO made the change for other reasons (usually financial, such as customer subscription lock-in) despite the technical downsides (which should have been presented by the CTO), then yes, in that case the blame would primarily fall to the CEO.
You blame the sales-oriented CEO for the problems but then point to a list of highly technical changes as the ultimate cause. A salesman knows nothing about these architecture decisions and would have trouble asking for them to be implemented even if they somehow knew it’s what they wanted to do.
Could a more technical CEO have turned the ship around more quickly? Sure. But let’s be honest, the blame rests at the feet of the engineering team. Someone got excited about using some new tech and didn’t fully consider the ramifications. This happens all the time. And if you’re lucky, the code review saves you, or if not then QA saves you, or if not then the beta testers save you. If a problem remains after that, then it tends to become really hard to undo, from an organization perspective.
This sounds more like a modern CTO felt the need to refactor the a big part of the codebase for the sake of it and if that wasn't foolish enough, they decided to not roll it out incrementally.
These sound like extremely technical decisions that presumably engineering leads in the company came up with, signed-off on, and convinced leadership to go ahead with.
I doubt a Salesperson has the technical expertise to initiate any of those changes.
It could have been the other way around, though. Engineers could have been faced with calls asking for a higher degree of integration and dependence on cloud servers for profit reasons (carefully sold as better UX), then developed it because that's what they're paid to do.
> especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power.
That reminds me: When S3 dropped support for MD5 ciphers, it ended up causing problems for a number of their customers who had remarkably old computers connecting to S3. The machines struggled to handle the newer / stronger ciphers they were now required to use. In one case it went from "just about keeping up" to "got no hope". That was a "fun" way to unexpectedly break folks.
> The machines struggled to handle the newer / stronger ciphers
Sort of like "test your stuff simulating a really shitty network connection", perhaps something else in that vein would be "test your stuff with excessively slow crypto and longer-keys."
I've implemented both UPnP discovery and mDNS, and mDNS was quite a bit easier to make reliable than UPnP. However, if they did have a reliable UPnP system, it would almost certainly destabilise the software for any transition like this. There's just so many different network issues to deal with, it's tough to debug when a user reports a problem and it's probably an issue with their router which is only sold in Germany. It is very frustrating class of bugs, when the app just doesn't find devices on the network.
Wow, thanks so much for the succinct and informative summary. I’m an owner of multiple SONOS speakers and am enraged by how these changes have effectively crippled my devices that I spent much hard-earned cash on. I am beginning to despair. I hope and pray they can just roll back half of them.
I suspect it’s all related to centralisation and control and subscriptions to radio services and profit however so I won’t hold my breath. Most enshittifcation has profit at its root. :-(
mDNS is superior to UPnP, they just made a compounding sum of bad choices that ended up in a bad architecture. I do hope companies start learning that you can't have suit doing running an engineering company
This is a dramatic take. What's worse about Google photos today vs 5 years ago? Android seems a lot better off today than 5 years ago. I know there have been some bad things as well, but overall there have been more positives.
Yep, it is definitely an engineer behind this, wanting to show off.
My job now is to deal with the aftermath of failed design choices at my company.
It only took a couple of guys to impose their deluded design, because noone stood up to call their bullshit.
We make embedded devices, the higher end are running linux.
But, they developped the linux devices as it was a desktop computer, the biggest latency hogs we have are multiprocess architecture over dbus, and event based UI which fetches live data.
The result is a slow and hanging UX, which gets slower after each update, and is irritating customers.
The lower end devices we sell are bare metal, and they are liked by our customers due to their swiftness. They just have a different architecture that focuses on end result (monolith, and a cache of data to display).
Scroll up. I've seen an overview mentioned about. The gist is: the architecture was good for the company and its revenue aspirations. The benefits to the customer a distant second.
It wasn't so much what but why. The constraints of why led to risky anti-customer product decisions. Decisions the CEO had no choice but to own.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, 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?
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 :/
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.
> He’ll remain an adviser to the Sonos board through June and get paid $7,500 per month until then. He’ll be paid a cash severance of about $1.9 million, and his unvested shares in Sonos will vest.
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.
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.
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 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.
Every couple of months I go to my fathers holiday home and upon arrival i will have to update the damn sonos device and the app and whatnot… its just a chore and rarely is anything different from when he first got the speakers years ago.
I just want to stream my spotify playlist to it and thats it.
To be honest I miss the oldschool BT pairing speakers and I will probably get him one of these soon since Im just done with sonos and I cant see how normal non IT people can even put up with this and figure this whole update mess out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Software problems almost never seem to actually impact brands, but this was so egregious it actually managed to. Even Crowdstrike increased revenue over the last year.
So… I’m not shocked at the timing. Sales have tanked, and proved the CEO couldn’t be relied on to right the ship.
It’s just one example of how long serious problems can fester in an organization. There’s likely deep cultural problems throughout the company’s decision making apparatus. We’ll see, but I don’t see Sonos capable of being a trusted brand again.
Finally! About time. Thank you, Sonos, for doing the right thing eventually. As an owner of several thousand dollars' worth of Sonos equipment, I swore I'd never buy another piece again unless Patrick was gone AND they rolled back the app. At least we have one of the two now. The new app is still flaky, unfortunately, but not as bad as it was a few months ago. I still get random disconnections and errors, and some features still don't work like it used to.
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..
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.
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.
I got a sonos device as my welcome gift to my previous company.
It's good that I can just simply stream spotify to it, but:
1- I don't like the sound processing. I mean, I understand that for most folks it's great, but they don't even come close to my Genelec setup. So I mostly use it to listen to podcasts, but for serious music/movies, I only use proper high fidelity sound setup
2- I don't like the all or nothing approach: if I don't like my current audio streaming setup, I can keep the speakers and the subwoofer, and just get new electronics. But with Sonos, I have to throw everything out.
A hardware company should not be able to brick products that can "in principle" work for a ling time.
What's your Genelec setup, and do you use it in a living room/home theatre room, or as a PC speaker setup?
I recently bought a pair of Genelec monitors (8330) and a sub (7350), and am interested in replacing my Sonos arc soundbar, sub, and satellite ones with a proper Genelec-based 5.1 based setup. But my only concerns are price (it'd be at least 5k), and the distance to the monitors - my sofa is ~4.2m away from the television, and the maximum distance where direct sounds dominate (green in this image from https://www.genelec.com/correct-monitors: https://images.ctfassets.net/4zjnzn055a4v/3SiwbzysMQkGR6oN47...) is 3m for all but the most expensive monitors. So I'm curious if it works well for you.
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.
Glad to see this here. I have a couple sonos speakers in my kitchen and I am still scared to update to the latest app. I was fortunate enough to check the sub-reddit prior to updating.
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 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 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.
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.
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'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.
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’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'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!
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'm clearly in the minority, but the new app is leaps and bounds more usable and stable for me. The functionality gaps don't affect me - those features weren't things I used. And it's way, way more responsive and consistent than the old one.
Perhaps it's just my specific network situation. The old app was a constant headache of inconsistent state - music playing while it showed nothing playing, pressing commands (like skipping a track or pausing) but those commands never happening on the device. It also took a very long time to show my entire device list. Never quite worked with the Roam like it should have.
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.
I hate my sonos setup now. It sounds great, but everything else has got worse since I bought them. The Sonos connect isn't supported by s2, the latency of changing volume got worse to the point that it is way too loud before you even notice it changing, There is something completely broken between Spotify/Sonos/Alexa making it only play Spotify free through sonos even though I have a subscription.
Then there's the things that were always shit, like no low latency streaming except through the analogue inputs on the Sonos connect and a closed protocol blocking open source improvements.
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.
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.
The combination of must use an app, the app mostly doesn't work, the speaker needs factory reset frequently makes it a paperweight on the way towards electronics recycling.
Firing the CEO seems good but insufficient. Liquidate the company, use the assets to try to offset the environmental damage done by the mass manufacture of e-waste. Or I suppose fix the software stack to bring the speakers back to usefulness, perhaps by throwing away everything done for the last few years in reset --hard fashion.
Over the holidays we played a game called Hitster which has a very simple premise of listening to music and guessing the release year. My in-laws have a Sonos system and it was so laughably bad connectivity-wise with the wrong song playing, no song playing, songs not stopping, etc...
I jokingly said that a 100$ bluetooth speaker would have been better, which was not super well received.
Bottomline is: It does not matter how good your sound system is if it's not reliable.
Good. System architecture aside, the UX alone was a disaster. Less discoverable, more layers of menus.
Plus flaky pairing and system discovery (from iPhones, at least). Wife’s new iPhone couldn’t connect, even though my older iPhone was running the same app version just fine.
It was bad enough I bought HomePods for the bedroom to replace the Sonos 1s we’d used for years. I still have them in another room, just someplace that they don’t get used as often.
It has been bizarre watching this debacle from the sidelines. I must have bought just on the recent side of whatever demarcation of problems are being complained about.
My app works fine. My speakers work fine. The worst problem we have is rarely the music pauses, we're unsure why, and we just hit play again.
I'm wondering if there is some functionality I am not aware I'm missing or if it is limited to older models that I am simply not experiencing the problems with?
Do you use the Sonos app itself? Most of my friends with Sonos just use Spotify/Apple music and skip the Sonos app altogether. It sounds like the app update was pretty horrible though - no ability to even _queue music_. But easily sidestepped by just using Spotify.
I spent truckloads of money on home theater and audio systems and have been quite happy with my Sonos.
I have the Sub, The original big play bar and some 1s and I have a record player that plays to sonos and then upstairs I have an Arc.
I've probably got 10 years on this system now and couldn't be happier. I remember having to replace my receivers 2-3 times in a 10 year time frame from failed circuits to needing HDMI to needing a newer HDMI and all that jazz.
My play bar has just been optical out from the TV and it's supported 5.1 audio realy well.
I use the spotify play direct. I'm not a huge fan of the newer app and I wasn't impressed with them EOL'ing products.
With that said, it's been wife and kid approved. Everyone in the house knows how to use it and its been problem free. No wires for my cat to chew on.
FWIW I have 4 sonos devices in my home and I've got basically zero problems. I guess I mostly use Airplay to control them but I do occasionally use the app and it's fine.
I have some Sonos systems installed in 2008 that are still working great. No hardware failures, app still does what it always did.
That being said they feel clunky and worse year after year, the UI is old fashioned, it's not quite as reliable. And of course the whole thing is orphaned. I'll never buy another set of several thousand dollars of Sonos v2 or whatever they want me to do.
I never understood why people bought Sonos products. They were fairly poor in terms of usability even before any shenanigans. My first and only Sonos ended up in a rubbish bin (well recycling bin) when it turned out it couldn’t reliably Play back audio books at 1.5x speed.
I never even considered giving it away because that would be a dick move.
Got a Teenage Engineering designed BT speaker instead.
I was blown away when I found out this expensive Sonos device I was setting up for my mother-in-law didn't support basic bluetooth pairing. Like what? The cheapest 20$ wireless speaker supports bluetooth...
Has anyone had a good experience with bluesound? Sends like they offer a similar product but with less big-corporate headache. Haven’t tried them myself, though.
Good. I hate "smart" speakers that need internet access to do a simple task. This is just market correction in my opinion and was bound to happen regardless of who the CEO was. As a speaker builder myself, it blows my mind people are ok with putting in spyware into their everyday home appliances like coffee-makers and speakers. I absolutely detest this trend.
Did they switch apps again, or is this still about the debacle when they switched from their original app to the second gen (S2) app many many years ago?
Because while that was a shitshow, that's ancient history by now. Did they screw up another generational switch?
It's a fundamentally awful business. If you make a good product and just sell it you get a one time payment and you have a brand that one one cares about because you are a one time decision every x years. You don't "consume" it, there is no "new fashion". One time payment, and not a big one.
So, companies try to avoid this fate by doing things which make for a better business - but invariably are bad for customers. In most cases, if you come across something awful like this, it's because just doing the right thing for customers doesn't make any money in that particular business due to the nature of the product and buying process.
Outside of initially setting up my Sonos speakers, I never venture into their app. I happily stream via Airplay2 from my iPhone or iPad. Everything has been working just great on my stereo-paired Sonos Ones in my den, a separate Sonos One in the kitchen, and a Sonos Era 300 paired to a Sonos Sub mini in my living room. No complaints here and if anyone is thinking about throwing theirs away, I'll gladly take them off your hands for free.
I sure hope they are already well into fixing the issues and that the resignation is just for posterity and shareholder appeasement, otherwise, any significant change will take half a year at minimum!
I’m now annoyingly used opening my Sonos app once, closing it, opening it again to get the damn ui to load current streams on any of the speakers.
The fact that, many months after this app update, I still don't have play controls in the notification shade is appalling. God forbid I need to pause my music or need to skip a track.
Someone had to make a decision as to when the updated app would ship. They did not make a wise choice.
The app update has been so bad I basically stopped listening to music completely. Decision making opposite of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"... went from truly one of the best app experiences to now the worst.
Sonos couples the digital music selection to the sound system, trapping you in an ecosystem that can then brick your devices. The Wiim Pro is a great digital receiver that you can hook up to any sound system. Use Spotify or whatever you want for digital music selection.
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).
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.
I never really use the app other than when building system which was hit or miss. But pleas make it work accross vlans without having to run seperate services to handle it!
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.
I‘m extremely happy about my 50 year old WEGA speakers that sound way better than any Homepod or Sonos that I had before. And I paid $90 for the used LB3541.
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.
In my living room I have a pair of loudspeakers, an 18 watt stereo tube amp that I service myself, an analog rotary mixer, a pair of turntables, and an IKEA Kallax full of records.
10 years ago my friends called me a hipster for doing this instead of cloud-based music, but not so much any more. When I hear these horror stories of enshitified HiFi platforms it makes me feel like I made the right investment decision.
I used to be a fan of Sonos and bought one of their speakers. The state of speakers to play music is actually pretty sad now: you're basically relegated to Sonos or a smart speaker (which I do not want).
I believe my (rather old) Sonos is now not supported and there's really no reason for that. It's such a Google move (eg earlier Nests aren't Matter-compatible for really no reason).
Even when I was using it, there were basic issues that plague most network-connected devices: they're usually really bad with dealing with transient network issues. Like if my Internet hiccups, I don't want the Internet radio station I'm playing to stop and have to be manually restarted.
Also, Sonos insists (or it did when I last looked into it) of creating it's own 2.4GHz mesh network. There was really no way of forcing it to use your existing network. You could kind of turn off the internal mesh network and force it to use Ethernet but not entirely.
As a user, I want to play my Spotify or Apple Music and have that synced across multiple speakers. That's the real value proposition of something like Sonos. It shouldn't be that hard. Particularly with music, you get fetch the whole song. There's really no reason for a network interruption at all.
I don't necessarily want to use a dedicated app either. I want to treat my Sonos as just another output choice on Spotify like headphones or a Bluetooth speaker.
Fault tolerance and ease of setup is what something like Sonos should be about. And that's hard because you have to deal with a long-tail of issues like packet loss, token expiry with third-party providers and so on.
I have no idea what Sonos have been doing isntead.
> you're basically relegated to Sonos or a smart speaker (which I do not want).
I use dumb bookshelf speakers with Bluetooth support. Mine are "Edifier" brand, but there are others. Works perfectly. (at least as "perfect" as BT can ever get) No apps or smart stuff, beyond BT.
On the other hand, when I'm trying to comprehend how to get audio from a TV into them, then I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I found one of the few remaining TVs with a headphone out, so I can use that. Next time my TV breaks, I guess I'll have to learn what is actually going with HDMI. Connecting arbitrary speakers to a TV seems like an arcane mystery.
The problem with Bluetooth is it doesn't have a really good audio codec. I really like the Sonos model of being a server that doesn't require a connected device to work as well.
I have a lot of problems with bluetooth, including connection troubleshooting, latency, and getting notification sounds on top of the media stream.
I've never heard a problem with fidelity before, and I am often picky about that. Like I can't stand the sound of satellite radio. Codec sounds horrible to me.
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.
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.
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.
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