I'm done with Sonos after they removed the ability to play music straight off the phone onto the speakers. The only way now to play music is via a service like Spotify or if you set up an mp3 server via SAMBA.
They keeping cutting features and making their older speakers obsolete. I'm furious as an early adopter of Sonos that they are essentially bricking my older speakers or making them useless for no reason. I can't Airplay to them either because they are older. I can see in the next year or so them completely rendering my speakers useless, which is unethical. I'm done with them.
I use shairplay[0] to stream from an iOS/macOS device, and Mopidy[1] with the Iris UI[2] to play server-side from your music collection, Spotify, or other internet radio.
My "speakers" are cheapo Bluetooth speakers with a raspberry pi attached to the back. Works beautifully and reliably. If the old Sonos devices have line in, maybe this is a way to continue using them?
Likewise, I shifted Sonos to the "dead to me" category when they removed from their desktop software almost all abilities to configure the rooms/speakers. Gotta use the iOS/Android app now. Oh, and the app really wants you to make a Sonos account and sign in, for no customer-serving reason at all.
From here on it'll be a Pi connected to an amplifier and speakers that won't try to subvert my will simply to listen to music.
For the moment it's a Pi 4 + Hifiberry Digi+ Pro with Volumio software. Volumio provides a pretty decent web UI, automatic scanning of connected USB storage, Airplay (v1), and a Spotify Connect plugin. There are also other plugins but I haven't looked into them too closely.
I also liked Roon Bridge on the Pi (and felt the audio output was slightly improved, although made no effort to counter the placebo effect) but couldn't quite justify the cost.
If you have a Linux box like a Pi, you can expose that machine's audio device over the network with PulseAudio, and if you have that enabled, it'll autoconfigure and work like any other PulseAudio device.
I used to share my DAC between my laptop and my desktop this way. Whenever I plugged my headphones in, it'd default to them on the local device, and the remote would default to the network device. I could walk away from my desktop while playing something, and it'd continue playing on whichever I had my headphones plugged into.
I’m using a Raspberry Pi with shairport-sync, a SPDIF HAT and a Maestro-50 amplifier (that I got for cheap) and am really happy with it. I even route TV audio through it and have a IR sensor for remote control.
i bought a play:1 years ago for the bathroom, mostly just to play radio or stream to it while getting ready in the morning. the account thing upset me too. i haven't updated the firmware or the sonos app just so i wouldn't have to create a stupid account.
i like the ikea symfonisk speakers but won't buy them for the same reason.
I have many more Sonos units than that. The majority are Connect:AMP devices (connected to the in-wall speakers my home came with), but some are their standalone speaker units.
For me, the biggest gripe is that its a pain in the arse to get networking to work when your configuration gets more complex than an "average person" living in a small house/apartment. Especially when there are multiple ways to make a wireless network connection across your property, and/or you have multiple subnets. At this point, I can bring down half my home network by connecting a new Sonos box, before I've changed some of its default configurations (which you can't do until you have it fully setup and connected).
My second biggest gripe is that they don't make rack-able multi-channel units. I'd love to rack one or two of these in my wiring closet instead of having a stack of Connect:AMPs on shelves.
Denon apparently now has a Sonos competitor that at least partially solves the second issue. I'm curious to see how it compares, but I've got enough Sonos gear that I'm not really ready to seriously consider replacing it. (And once all my stuff is setup, it does work rather painlessly.)
They do not require you to install updates to play music. Updates are never mandatory, except that if you update a zone player then you must update the controller to control it. If your controller is ahead of the ZP that works fine.
It's because you have your zone player(s) set to automatically update. I've ignored updates for months on end and never had the first trouble with doing so.
My brother asked me for a audio solution for a project of his and proposed Sonos. His use case was basically connecting a phone to the speaker system.
I explained why I wouldn’t take it and my main argument is that any “smart” device isn’t exactly reliable in the long term, be it missing updates for old hardware, cutting out features, servers that stop working etc.
He got a simple Amp with a single volume knob now and some decent passives. Phone connects via line cable.
He may be interested in devices which can connect to a phone via bluetooth and to amps via standard audio cables. They basically turn any old amp/speakers setup into a wireless streaming one, and they work quite well.
I use something exactly like this product (an old one from monoprice actually I believe). Simply plugs into the back of a 2.1 speaker set I have. Guests at my place love it, they can easily just connect to the Bluetooth and play through speakers. Pretty seamless. Not sure of any quality drop, my speakers aren't the best.
Right, I use a TT-BA08 to plug my cheap cable headphones in (since most new Smarthones ditched the 3.5mm), which connects to another one which is only a sender (and has no volume controls). That sender receives a line-out of a little analog mixer into which a PC and other devices plug in.
This is quite nice, because it allows me to stand up and walk around while the PC continues its audio playback.
I don't understand why HNers are willing to buy smart speakers when we make such a fuss lamenting the fact that nobody makes dumb TVs anymore. Buy dumb speakers and connect them to a little PC so you can run whatever software you want.
Pure convenience here. Sure, 20 year old me would hate me for putting cloud connected smart speakers in my home but I'm not 20 anymore and available time was replaced by available money. I honestly looked and would have paid more for a fully local speech to text hub with basic apps and a nice API but there simply wasn't anything that looked like it wouldn't annoy the living hell out of me. I don't want to setup raspberry pis around my house, maintain and update weird open source stacks and whatnot. I want to stream stuff to speakers, control devices around the house through voice and sometimes use other convenience functions.
Fully realizing the hit on privacy, I understand the thing enough and, more importantly, trust my particular manufacturer enough that it simply outweighs that concern for me.
The Sonos experience was amazing. Great sounds, really simple to use, being able to play music in different rooms is cool, etc, and just plugging in the speakers into the power outlet without any extra cords really made for a great experience. It's much cleaner not having to worry about running speaker wire everywhere, or having laptops or rpis everywhere.
But they brick their older hardware or render them purposefully useless so as far as I'm concerned they are evil as fuck now.
A smart TV doesn't offer any value add for me - I have a chromecast, I have a recorder. By contrast, a smart speaker in the kitchen does add value. Being able to use Siri to set a timer, play music or add something to the shopping list when up to my elbows in cake mixture is of benefit.
It used to be the case that your phone showed up as a source if you were using the Sonos app on that phone. You could play podcasts or any files that were stored on your device. Now you can't. They added AirPlay to newer hardware but older hardware can't do it. For example my ZP100, the original Sonos player (which still is supported 15 years after it was first marketed), cannot do AirPlay.
That and the fact that you can only activate them by using an online service. Screw that, if I buy a device like that I expect it to simply work. No grafted on service models. Too bad for Sonos.
I was initially excited when I saw that Ikea was now offering speakers that could be integrated into the Home Smart (Trådfri) system.
Then I saw that they were Sonos-based, and immediately noped out of buying any. I'm not keen on buying something if the vendor can yank features (or worse, brick the gear they sold like Logitech did) at their whim.
The Ikea symfonisk speakers that are basically rebranded cheap Sonos speakers support Airplay 2.
So Apple users can still stream from their devices towards the speakers.
At 100$ a piece that's not bad.
With no line in port I returned both of mine. Since I'm not already invested in Sonos that's too much lock-in for my liking. Should you have to keep paying to keep using?
yeah, similiar experience. I've got a play 3 and the think it's quite a pain. I would never buy a sonos or recommend it to anyone, it's a poorly supported walled garden which only introduces features to the newer speakers and is not even working that well.
I'm in the same camp as you. I love Spotify and have 0 interest in amassing and maintaining my own music collection any more. Ever since they added the ability to play directly from the Spotify app to Sonos I couldn't be happier.
All (9) but one of my Sonos speakers get used regularly without issue. I do with Airplay worked with them, but I've recently drank the Kool Aid of streaming music after much resistance.
I do wish our Play One could proxy Airplay to the others.
The speakers that support Airplay can proxy Airplay to the others, with caveats: you can group a speaker that's playing Airplay with speakers that don't support AirPlay and it'll play back on all the speakers just fine. The big catch is that the speaker that's actually receiving the AirPlay stream has to keep playing it; if you ungroup that speaker, it'll stop AirPlay playback on all the grouped speakers. Not sure whether that's an actual technical limitation or just a limitation in Sonos's UI, though.
I wish AirPlay behaved more like Line In does (on speakers that support that), where the Line In devices become available to any speakers on the network.
Sounds like an iOS specific limitation? I have a mix of gen1 hardware as well as some newer stuff. Playing from Android phones still works fine even on the old hardware, though I primarily stream from Spotify or from a local Plex server
I think the older ones never did support AirPlay. They has some other mechanism in an older app, but I’m not sure of it was apple or Sonos that killed that.
They keeping cutting features and making their older speakers obsolete. I'm furious as an early adopter of Sonos that they are essentially bricking my older speakers or making them useless for no reason. I can't Airplay to them either because they are older. I can see in the next year or so them completely rendering my speakers useless, which is unethical. I'm done with them.