Sonos Port to control HK 3390 using IR ports

I’m just going to say that what amounts to an enormously expensive adapter box ought to truly bridge with as much interoperability as possible to legacy stereo receivers. There are now lots of competing, affordable AirPlay adapters out in the marketplace now. So, if there is no leg up in Sonos’ adapter, then more and more people may completely switch away from the Sonos ecosystem for one that’s operating with better open standards, given that Sonos isn’t offering solutions to what people want to do, anyway.

It strikes me that there must be some way that Port could be sending signals to receives that can be controlled by IR controllers, and especially those that even have wired inputs, based on supporting “remote” IR receivers.

And if Sonos wants to just put old, beloved hardware behind, then they ought to get some product in market in the form of, say, AMP that is actually in both the price and quality league of what’s now a myriad of networkable receivers in the marketplace. Sonos offers products consumers, in general, and I love but it should be more solutions and community of customers oriented. That may be a hard idea for Sonos to abide, given that they have been such a leader in this regard for so long. But what was a secure space with less competition for them is now growing more crowded. So, I hope Sonos shows the same spirit of innovation in this regard that they have in making high-quality, multi-room “network” audio systems affordable and convenient for its customers. A lot of people have bought Sonos to this point for the value it delivered. And wish them well because of already having some sunk investment in their tech. 

Anyway, to be clear, I don’t want to control a Port with IR, in my case, I want a Port to control a receiver that can be controlled with IR, and preferably through a wired input port capable of taking IR inputs from a device. Core need is to kick the receiver out of power-saving standby mode, and back into it after the receiver is no longer receiving audio from Port. Volume control would be nice, too.

There are many other bells and whistles that might be supported, but those are the essentials.

Anyway, I have my answer, for now, I guess. Sonos Port won’t serve this need.

I’d like to thank you for your succinct assistance and reply as a member of the Sonos community. Really appreciated. So many of the threads on this point left the answer open to deduction for those of us not handy with a soldering iron. ;-)

I respect your views.

You are right there are other stream-to options, like the old Airport Express I already use. I skip out of the Sonos network and just use AirPlay. But, of course, these devices do not trigger a receiver out of standby mode. Sonos sells convenience, so I’m just suggesting a small future convenience feature. 

It’s a trigger function for IR equipped devices in addition to 12V trigger capable devices I’m talking about. And lots of receivers have wired inputs for remote IR, which seems to me means an interface that takes the need to use actually IR out of the picture is possible. It’s just the use of the wired interface that’s required.

I fully appreciate what you are saying about the economies of scale related to offering that. That’s why it seems to me better to address it as a capability of a mass-produced product. I’ll admit I’m unfamiliar with the possible issues of emulating the output from an IR receiver. But if people are hacking together solutions with a soldering iron and a few circuits, which some community posts suggest, this doesn’t seem out of reach for some future version of Port, etc. And if this adaptability existed, then there’d be a reason to buy a Port for my purposes, and apparently those of others who have posted.

I am not ‘dissing’ Sonos. Though, I would have appreciated it if they made some effort to make clear statements comprehensible to the lay person about what their interfaces won’t do, when it appears people are asking about a specific capability in good faith, not just on this forum but on independent audio forums. And they could support their compatibility claim with some more clarifying information than leaving it to trial and error by their existing and prospective customers, saving them from wasted time. I offer that as a constructive suggestion for improving the customer service around this topic.

And, of course, I can always look to take my business elsewhere. I stand my ground however that Port is a device marketed to support integration with legacy and third-party systems, and, for the price, it could be a little better. Can’t great products always get a little better? And I say that with all due respect for a manufacturer I respect and whose products I have purchased. I’m posing a feature set improvement to buy yet one more thing from Sonos. 

Anyway, I’m not sure what’s “inelegant” about providing elegant solutions that bridge the past to the present for your customers. Of course, I would not want a crappy solution. But I’ll confess I just don’t understand why there can’t be a good one. 

Thanks so much for sharing the information and your insights. It’s great there are active participants in this product community like yourself. Sonos is fortunate its customers are devoted enough to both defend it and invest time in sharing their interests and needs, as best they can express them.

Lots of companies will clearly say what they can’t do once they get a number of direct questions. Sometimes they’ll even tease with potential feature update proclamations.

Of course, no company can anticipate ever question they might be asked. You are right about this. But in this case, the question is not hypothetical, merely recent, or from one customer alone. There are other variations on the question within this forum, and definitely to be found on independent audio discussion sites. I wouldn’t be saying so if I hadn’t seen them. 

For sure, I’m suggesting a higher level of disclosure within a customer service relationship than many companies provide. Sonos isn’t just selling a product, its selling services. 

Out in the world of audio there are many ways companies market using terms for services that are sometimes based on but do not state the generic standards behind them. For a lay person like myself, understanding what is being expressed is not always easy. So we have questions. 

Part of the problem for me also rests with the receiver manufacturer, which makes no statements referring to an objective standard, as even a starting point. Sure this is common. But I don’t like it. I don’t feel like I have to be satisfied with that status quo state of affairs.

Even standards disclosures don’t deal with all interoperability issues. For example, in my experience, Sonos and Samsung, both supposedly compatible with the HDMI(ARC) standard, still have their differences, though I’ve observed them now over several years slowly adapting through software how the apply the HDMI(ARC) standard, I expect because of consumer expectations this work properly. I can tell you my user experience is miles better today than it was when I first assembled a home video system of supposedly standards compliant components involving Samsung and Sonos products.

I also don’t think companies are automatically geniuses about everything a marketplace will appreciate. I will offer the case of the now extinct but once dominant “Blackberry”, as an example.

It’s also not uncommon to see new or old standards or different standards incorporated in new product feature sets. I appreciate this may not be one of those cases. But I recall when you couldn’t find a Sonos product that supported BlueTooth, or when there was no cheap way to connect an analog audio input into one of their speakers, to either play from the analog device to the speaker or to stream onto a Sonos or Airplay network. There is now. Kudos to Sonos.

I don’t know how other streamers could possibly design an interface box that would enable sending an analog input into Sonos’ proprietary network framework, with a device control interface of this kind. I’ll say Sonos has often been a market leader due to its innovative spirit and responsiveness to consumers. It’s developed and offered many features, great and small, ahead of its competitors. This is what I think might be a very small one alongside others. But I’d be entirely open to some expert opinion on why not from the company, with no hard feelings.

Hey, out in the world of audio, even as people are loving Sonos’ convenient and high quality system there still remains a thirst for vintage. I think we are well past the point where integrating with vintage systems should be thought of as cannibalizing Sonos’s business model. And how about great marketing values in the public related to sustainability and keeping consumer electronics from ending up in landfills before the end of their useful life.

I can see that Sonos is now a mature company trying to obtain and retain marketshare and could be in a better position to sweat some of this small stuff from a development perspective. When, in the past, this would have been a distraction for an upstart company with bigger fish to fry in terms of the networked audio services marketplace. They are more diversified now in their approach to selling both products and services.

Sonos seems to me to be an “aspirational” company, not one satisfied with the idea things can’t be done. But I do, as you say, understand that companies can’t do everything. But I also think consumers can ask for anything. Chips will then fall as they may. ;-)

I’m not posing some good and evil debate here. 

Cheers,

Have a great day. Fun to have conversed with you.

Sorry. A company behaves one way during the phase where it’s making a market, and another once they have to start serving it because other capable competitors are emerging. I understand and respect well enough Sonos’ past priorities and compared to the opportunity yawning before them at the time, fiddling with this would both earn chump change and probably customer service calls. I get it.

I bet they are getting a few over the DC switching, as it is. But, who knows, maybe a wired connection through a IR extension ports on a receiver would be reliable. I wish I knew more about this stuff, but don’t. I just haven’t seen the technical case – which well might exist – for why this is a “can’t do” rather than a “won’t do”.

I expect there are millions of IR controllable devices still out and in operation, and that includes a swathe of still functioning audio receivers.

And certainly we’re going to start seeing companies creating Matter to IR solutions, even if they don’t exactly fit this application, again because of the proprietary nature of the Sonos system. The urge to control existing IR solutions is going to be great, I suspect.

Here’s an example of a device developer trying out the market. Not an “elegant” solution in my case and not as elegant as might be done by just sending signal rather than IR from a well-crafted Sonos box like Port. If I was a hobbyist for doing these sorts of things, maybe a Homekit automation could be written using Apple air play and an instruction leveraging Matter.

But having said that: I think you’re right that we’re at “case closed” unless someone else is out there to contribute to the thread, besides you or me. You’re right that to this point someone at Sonos has judged the solution not worth providing. The outcome is obvious.

And it’s very cool you were such an early Sonos aficionado. It was and still is a great system.

Cheers.