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).
Oh interesting. You are right i always thought they are not streamers and thats why i always dismissed idea of LS50 Wireless.
That makes it indeed a lot more interesting if you are $$$ and dont really care if they one day stop software support.
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.
We used Sonos at a place I used to work, and it was easily one of the worst tech experiences I've ever had. Constant issues. We had a 10-step troubleshooting guide that had to be referenced daily (until everyone had memorized the steps out of repetition), with a bonus (half-)joke step that was "dash it to the ground". Even during the infrequent and intermittent working periods, it was nothing special.
I've always been amazed at how different my experience apparently was to everyone else's, because I only ever see glowing praise (before the apparently disastrous new app rollout, which still sounds like a better experience than I had). I can only assume there were significant updates and improvements in the time since, because the company wouldn't have lasted a month if our experience was typical.
The app experience was bad for years even before this new app. The strange thing is when I was complaining then there were always defensive voices ready to deny any bad experience. I’m glad it’s finally come to light. Spent so much for Sonos.
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.
