A place for all Sonos users to hang out and discuss hardware, software, installation, ideas, and troubleshooting.
Reading the still-in-progress AMA on Sonos's forums, it's all over.
The few responses from Sonos are tone deaf. It's not like they were ignorant of their customers' sentiment.
I have ~30 Sonos devices. I'm not going to throw them out but it seems prudent to reduce my exposure to Sonos's management decisions.
What a shame. When it works, Sonos is awesome.
But, it doesn't work reliably, they don't care, and there are alternatives.
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Their lack of apology and engagement over this leaves me concerned that I’m tied to a company who may not be as concerned with obsolescence as i’d like them to be.
It seems like it should be the management that becomes obsolete. Not the speakers.
Next shareholder vote I am voting no on every board member. Every stockholder on here should do the same.
I’m not a shareholder but I may get one share just to do the same
At about $17 per share you can get a lot more than one share for what you paid for your Sonos system.
How often do they hold these votes? How are you notified? (I don’t really know much about stocks)
As a shareholder you get a notice to vote from your brokerage. Most brokers send the link via email. Votes are once a quarter, but do not always include votes for board.
They want you to buy new Sonos products like you would a cell phone. Too bad people into A/V don’t see things that way, they want things that last
This is a recurrent theme with Sonos—witness the drama over bricking old equipment when you upgraded and the S1-S2 divide.
They never seem to understand that their users are accustomed to thinking of speakers as durable goods that should last indefinitely.
The problem with fighting that mindset is that there are decades of time and many such speakers, so the space doesn’t lend itself to being transformed with a brusque “you bought a service; get with the times and be excited about what we give you!” lecture.
They understand. It’s just that they are a tech company, and the way you make money in tech is with marked up hardware with planned obsolescence, subscription software, and micro transactions.
The speakers are hardware; the software has always been buggy, and now they don’t do anything special. A bunch of Alexa’s can give you whole home audio along with a hundred other devices. They are a hardware company that thinks otherwise. Now I kinda wish apple bought them a few years ago.
I’d disagree about the software always being buggy. That was not the case prior to sonos going public and expanding their product line. (As well as sending their tech support overseas) It used to be bulletproof and work flawlessly (as long as it was configured properly)
When I started buying Sonos back in 2010 they were selling a product not a service. They seem to have forgotten that.
I’ve blocked updates so all of my Gen 1 speakers, including the Play 5 I bought in 2010, still work flawlessly. As a bonus I don’t have to deal with random Sonos updates “breaking” anything.
I specifically blocked the update in the app a few days before the rollout. I was pushed the update anyway 😕. Is there a way to block the updates I'm not familiar with?
App Store updates needed to be blocked.
Yes I would love to know this too!
You have to make sure your phone has auto updates turned off. Then you have to block the following hostnames on your router:
update.sonos.com updates.sonos.com update-firmware.sonos.com update-software.sonos.com update.ws.sonos.com updates.ws.sonos.com update-firmware.ws.sonos.com update-software.ws.sonos.com update.sslauth.sonos.com updates.sslauth.sonos.com update-firmware.sslauth.sonos.com update-software.sslauth.sonos.com
Teach us sensei
I may have to question my whole commitment to Sonos route.
I have been using Sonos since about 2008 and since the S1 S2 thing I decided not to invest anymore in Sonos. So when it came time to get more gear last year I went with three Bluesound Pulse M wireless speakers. So glad I made the change. Meanwhile my remaining Sonos gear is running S1 only.
The s1-s2 divide never broke any features, it just stopped adding features to the s1 tech and products. This is completely different, we were not warned what updating would do and 99% of users would have auto updated because sonos said it'll be better.
S2 definitely led to more glitches and issues with the sonos infrastructure though. I never had issues like I do now, with s1
Yes, very true. Been a Sonos user since about 2008 and when the S1 S2 thing happened it created a lot of doubt about this company for me. Anyway did not need to buy anymore hardware until last year and I went with Bluesound Pulse M wireless speakers, three of them. So very glad I did. Much easier to setup and use than Sonos. No BS account log in required to get them to work. Wifi stability is much better.
One issue which I resolved was the update messages. The thing is it works how I want it right now and figure I don’t want updates which may change things for the worse like Sonos bricking things. So it was easy to block the Bluesound update server in my router. No more pesky update messages.
Can you share how this overlaps with Sonos features?
If I did this I’d be comparing with Sonos S1. I have some very old Sonos gear and I wanted to keep them all working within the same framework so I did not split the system as Sonos pushes you to. Earlier Sonos bricked some of my older gear as part of there moving forward with improvements. I thought this was shitty and it removed some convenient functions with it. Plus because I am running S1, none of the new currently available Sonos gear can be added to it.
We all use and expect different things from these systems. Three of the big things for me that Bluesound has over Sonos.
Bluesound is a younger product so was designed from the ground up with the functionality we currently expect. Whereas Sonos was established in about 2002 and has gone through many transitions to try to meet customer expectations and technology changes.
(I have experienced this with internet providers, was with an old company TPG and their portal for managing your account was very slow, clunky and featureless. Switched to a younger company Aussie Broadband and the portal is fantastic and super useful)
2. Bluesound DOES NOT require you to create and log in to an account to get it to work. Free at last! I found the Sonos account/log in and system ownership to be unnecessary, cumbersome and caused more problems than benefits. Before Sonos introduced the log in thing it worked pretty good. After that if you lost power and your system rebooted it did not always come back online properly and required some amount of dicking around to get it working again. Bluesound does not have this issue. Drop the power from some or all of the system and they all just come back online quickly without hassle.
3. Preset customisation of Bluesound. On the top of the speaker and Bluesound Node (like a Sonos Port) there are buttons which only light up when you put your hand near them. The 5 at the back are presets which you can have programmed to play different sources. I really like this feature and it gets heavy use. So without the need to reach for a phone or tablet and open the app, I can press one button on the speaker and have music playing, Sonos does not have this feature. To me the presets are invaluable. Also, you can set volume upper and lower limits within the app so that an idiot cannot accidentally hit full volume and risk damage to speakers.
In general I found that Bluesound did all the stuff that Sonos did but better. Initial setup was quicker and easier. I have a NAS with a heap of FLAC files and Bluesound had no trouble being configured to use and play that library of music. Compared to Sonos S1 the Bluesound loads the album art library much quicker.
Oh yes, Bluesound has alarms.
Lastly I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, but have used free Spotify on occasion via Sonos and Bluesound and did not have any issues with Bluesound. I could use Spotify within the Bluesound app or direct the Spotify app to connect and play through any Bluesound device with ease.
If you have any specific questions I am happy to answer.
I just completed a very expensive change over from 20 odd years of Bose equipment to Sonos, totally frustrated by their old tech & incompatibility with other equipment, and a useless app to use their amps. Scared now I could be in for the same thing with Sonos
Ya I think that ship has sailed and they‘ve got something else up their sleeve now.
I’d always assumed a CEO who came from BlackBerry would prioritize not making the same mistake…
Didn’t know he came from BlackBerry, hardly a ringing endorsement.
Courage would have been an apology, not nerfing features with premature release and a classic diversion marketing spin response to widespread frustration and anger. Gutless
Didn’t they apologize a few days ago?
No
If they did, I didn't got it. And they have my email
Then I was wrong
It’s not that the does not work for some that’s the bad thing here, it’s Sonos not warning anyone about the side effects like the temporarily missing features. When they would have been up front about this and given time line they now published, the effect of this would not have been so bad.
I'm not sure that would have helped much for a couple of reasons.
Most people have their apps set to auto update.
The warning would have needed to be forced to users somehow, as not everyone reads the in-app notifications messages.
The warning would need to be strongly titled to emphasize the loss of features over the gain of a pretty new app (i.e. "New App Will Temporarily Lose Features!").
All said and done, the only way so many of the issues around this new app could have been easily avoided is if they had released it as a separate app (S3).
But they didn't care about the impact on their customers (and appear to still not even understand it based upon their AMA responses). All they cared about was themselves (and their investors perception of them).
PS. For those downvoting me, I'm not saying Sonos shouldn't have tried to communicate the side effects of the temporarily missing features, I'm saying it wouldn't have been as effective and all encompassing as just making the new app a separate app (S3). I can guarantee you, that even with the early warning, people's apps would have still been auto-updated because some people would not have seen the warning and would not have turned off the auto-update. A completely separate app solves this problem and ensure no one ends up with a screwed up system.
fair. but still lax from them. appreciate the innovation in the new design but it feels rushed. not like people were complaining about the previous version.
I would've settled for them putting a disclosure of loss functionality in the fine print like FAQs, then I could blame myself for not reading. But nope, can only blame them.
I turned off auto update in the Sonos app, but that seems to only have worked for "system" (firmware) updates. Because the app updated anyway, and as a result, my Sonos system is currently borked.
At this moment I have an entire room missing that just happens to be my master bedroom. Also have around 30 devices, so heavily invested since like 2014. By far the worst thing they have ever done and at one point they were the only game in town; no longer. Fuck Sonos
So many people have so many devices. I don’t have 30 but I have 10. AND I had 10 1st gen models that I sold or gave away when they bricked them….that should’ve been a huge red flag when these premium products just wouldn’t work with the new ones or on the new app. My system is working for now…..but I had to hire an engineer to come to my house and set up my Wi-Fi, hard wire one speaker and even then the app would sometimes recognize my system and sometimes I literally had to delete it and add it again. How stupid is that
I wished someone had hammered my hand when I ordered my first Sonos...
I agree. I would be easy for them to come out and apologize for features breaking and that they will work hard to win back our trust. That at least shows that they are listening to their customers. As someone who has spent $1-2k a year consistently on their products, I'm inclined to stop buying their products since I don't trust that they are acting in my long term interest.
Which only proves that they 1) aren’t listening and understanding their customers and thus 2) don’t think they’ve done anything wrong.
This in turn means they aren’t learning from their mistakes in this situation and will more than likely repeat them again.
I stopped buying speakers at the S1 S2 thing. I need a few more now, and they aren't going to be Sonos, for sure! I think I'll have a nice playbar +sub for the computer. The living will get something else new.
So uh, any decent Sonos alternatives? Looking like a good time to get out
Would also be interested in knowing some alternatives, just in case I need to jump ship in the near future.
Unfortunately no one does it as well as sonos. Wiim looks really good for my use case where I mostly have amps and a port, and much cheaper. But they don't have smart speakers or sound bars and the app doesn't control most of the music services so it's still a downgrade in that respect.
It's so disappointing to see a company with as much going for it as sonos get run into the ground.
Separate speakers sound better than a soundbar anyway ;-) ….but don’t suit everyone’s setups of course
no one can do it as well as sonos, their patents block it.
Wiim streamer connected to speakers of your choice. Won't do home theater, but it'll do local and streaming music with no fuss.
Hopefully just a matter of time before Wiim do a basic HT 5 channel or similar amp. Heck they’ll probably blow it out of the water and do 5.2.2 with room correction or something!
Pretty hard to downgrade from sonos amp and 5.1 to my old denon avr and a wiim streamer. But I'm considering it.
If you mean wireless multi room speakers made by a company that gives a shit about its customers, no, I don’t think that exists anymore.
They are more focused on the customers they don’t have yet.
Anyone have experience with bluesound?
B&O
Bowers and Wilkins have some awesome sounding speakers. My brother has some, but I have not messed around with the interface myself.
This is where I'm at. I must have close to 30 individual speakers. I have professionally-installed, whole-house/property office-grade wifi, with hardwired wireless access points spread all over the place and a rack in the basement.
Despite this, the speakers cut in and out, it takes forever for them to appear when I open the app (S2 still), and grouping more than 4 speakers together causes all kinds of balkiness and cutting out, etc. I've reached out to Sonos support, sent in diagnostics, and they have no idea what to do. They suggested I purchase a particular product to solve this, but when I wrote back to confirm their advice, they basically were like "what? No. We don't know if that will help or not." I gave up because I am frankly just too busy to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. The whole point of Sonos was that "it just works," except my experience is that they just don't work reliably. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Maybe the new app will solve that, and it would be great if it did. But it's far too many posts of users explaining how akshully it works great, but you just have to delete everything and factory reset everything and hardwire everything and then do this and then do that and then do the other thing, and THEN it will work well.
Hey Sonos, I just do not have time for that kind of bullshit.
Unless ALL of your speakers/amps/ports are wired, I'd honestly try disconnecting ethernet from ALL of them- yes, even your racked amps. Sonosnet is terrible.
When I first set up my system, I connected my sound bar and sub to Ethernet, my surrounds, speak pairs wifi. I had a lot of issues with this setup. I disconnected the Ethernet and setup everything on wifi. This made all the difference, everything was so much better.
Hey. I'm a custom integrator in Tampa that does pretty big jobs and homes and a ton of Sonos along with other brands (control4, bluesound, etc.) and we do some high end robust WiFi systems.
Unplug all your Sonos that are hardwired and run them all on WiFi if you have a good WiFi system in place. Sonos notoriously shuts down networks and cause a list of problems with our home automation systems when they're hardwired. We usually have 1 piece plugged into the network and the rest run on WiFi and it cuts down the amount of issues tremendously.
I think someone else recommended that too and I'm just here to completely agree even though it goes against the usual logic of networking and WiFi
Thanks for posting this. Renovating and was about to pull the plug on Sonos but this issue has me wary…
It's still a great product. If you're not doing a home automation system and just using Sonos, it's great. If you are doing some bigger stuff then I'd look at all your options. If you're working with an integrator they should hopefully know all this and steer you in the right direction
Yes! And don’t get me started on the STUPIDITY that is using the WRONG cost values for RSTP on wired networks. Seriously- Sonos wants to be easy to use and modern but can’t support the most reliable network solution to detect and prevent network loops?!? I guarantee at least 70% of their large network support tickets are somehow related to this one brain dead decision.
Only have one speaker plugged into Ethernet and tweak your network settings man. Had same issue and you can fix it. Also went thru many of the same things you did including 2 gigabit fiber, and a 3k mesh system after a 1.5k mesh system didn’t work.
This echos my experience almost exactly. At the end of the day, I just want to pay for a system which works. When Sonos works, it works great, but when it doesn’t it’s frustrating, and I don’t have time to diagnose issues. That should be what I’m paying for.
Do you NEED to use the Sonos app to use their home theater soundbar and sub? Obviously for one-time setup I need to use the app but what about for every day use?
How are you listening to Atmos music if not through their app?
I don’t have it yet but was about to go buy it on Memorial Day weekend. My main goal was to use it for watching movies. Not music.
You don’t Need to use the app everyday or at all after setup. Listening to music doesn’t require use of the Sonos App exclusively. You could easily never need to use it if you use Spotify or Apple Music.
No need to touch it for TV use either besides putting on speech enhancement or night mode really.
Watching movies you're good.
Listening to music and utilizing the full power of Sonos you'll need the app.
As for watching TV - I use the volume slider in the app more than my remote but probably because I'm always around my phone, not always around the remote. But not a necessity, just a quirk of mine
Can you not throw them out? Can you send them to me please.
I just had a thought - up next are the headphones, which is a terrible idea to begin with.
Install the previous version, apk 16.1 and prevent it from upgrading. The procedure has been written in this forum and it works very well.
As others have said, the idea, in my mind, behind Sonos, is that it just works. Since this fucking update and all of the surrounding disaster (partly my fault for having automatic updates on, but why should that be a terrible thing?), I've had to hardwire my little mini music setup - 2x Era 100s and a Sub Mini. The whole thing was going absolutely haywire, music was dropping in and out, they wouldn't work at all, sometimes the sub would work and the Era 100s wouldn't.
So what I've had to do is hardwire them, via ethernet, all the way to the local internet port in my home. And that seems to have fixed the issues with the speakers, but the app is still a fucking nightmare to use. It is so unbelievably glitchy, and to be honest, completely useless.
How the hell is a company, that is raking it in, and that prides itself on selling "premium" products, unable to make a working, good-quality app? Given their obsession (correct me if I'm wrong) with having all lossless audio etc only being able to go through the app. All I want to do is use Airplay to directly stream Apple Music to my setup, via the Apple Music app or through the desktop version. That's all I want, with lossless audio, I mean, via Apple Music and not the Sonos app.
I've hardwired the units, which is good for the rest of the mesh system anyway (less backlog, less interference, less backhaul used), but this ridiculous situation with the app is driving me crazy. I live in Australia, and even the app for the shitty, budget airline here that has gone into liquidation is better (and they were only around for one year).
It's a joke, and the lack of apology says it all. A few months ago, I started saving for a pair of Fives, because my Era 100s + sub were performing great, but I wanted to up the quality by getting the Fives, given I both listen to a huge amount of music, and because I play music as well. Now I'm thinking of selling all of my Sonos products and moving on (also own various other speakers e.g. an Arc, Era 300s).
This is pretty standard for any company.
They know their most heavily used features. This update worked for most features for most customers. The average person using it for home theater or simple music playing probably never noticed an issue. Online pitchfork mobs almost always skew towards those negatively impacted, so there is some bias as far as how unhappy people are online. Sonos has a lot of customers, and not all are represented in forums like this.
Also, executives know people are lazy, cheap and have short attention spans. Most customers who did have a negative experience are not going to rip out an investment of hundreds to thousands of dollars due to an inconvenience of the app not working and having the features they want even if that's a month or two. Given time, the bulk of those are going to forget this annoyance once it's fixed and a few months have passed. Why do you think politicians have "October surprise" during election season and not "August Surprise"? It's because they know the public doesn't usually have the attention span for months of outrage. People who work in the C-suite have the same knowledge.
Plus people in this sub really should do those surveys they send out. That is directly telling them what you want. They can only pull so much info from the app.
I never get surveys from them.
How is queue management not one of the most used features of the app? I find that extremely hard to believe. Every single audio app on my phone has that ability… except for Sonos. Even the stupid New York Times audio app allows me to add tracks to a queue.
I’ve been a Sonos user for years, I wish the queue management was still here but I barely ever use it. I put a playlist or album on most of the time and that’s all I usually need.
That’s great. I, like many people, like to queue up multiple albums or tracks, or multiple podcasts. There is a reason that queue management is a feature in literally every audio app on your phone.
I have had Sonos for many many years and have 20+ speakers in my house. I have never used the Queue management, like ever. Just saying if you use it to listen to streamed music then you will rarely use it as the streaming service will be the queue.
Same. Never once used it. Had it for nearly two decades and never fucking bother. Pick a streaming station and hit go. If I wanted to spend time curating I’m using something else. I don’t represent everyone but the opposite of their mantra is also true.
Why do all the streaming apps have queue management?
I juggle streaming from about a dozen different sources. The joy of sonos to me has been having one app that controlled everything. One interface to use, one place to search, one place to make a queue and Playlists. That's the killer feature of sonos for me. Seeing that get shut down is just mind blowing. Why on earth would they want me to leave their app and go to all those individual services? They are probably my 4th most used app right now after Gmail, Google maps, and imessage. Most companies would kill for that kind of engagement with their app.
I doubt it’s shut down, more likely it just wasn’t ready or was super buggy when they had to push this update out. Far from ideal but totally plausible to imagine that feature will be back soon along with other improvements.
Similar. I've had Sonos for close to 10 years and I never use the queue. I just choose playlists and play them.
Does changing the volume, pressing play/pause and adding speakers to a group count as the most heavily used features? Because the new app struggles with all of these things. I'm so frustrated with this focus on sleep timers and shit when the app actually doesn't work for adjusting the volume.