Alexa Multi Room Music and Sonos One

  • 9 January 2018
  • 10 replies
  • 10028 views

I purchased the Sonos One because of its built in Alexa support. I set up the Sonos One and LOVED the sound quality but was extremely disappointed to find out that it didn’t support Alexa’s Multi Room Music capability. I have already invested in several Amazon Echos and wanted the Sonos One to upgrade my game room sound but am happy with the sound of the Echo in my smaller rooms such as my office and the kitchen. I realize I could have SONOS speakers everywhere but that is overkill (and too expensive) in my situation. Because of this I returned the Sonos One. If you add Alexa Multi Room capability in the future then I will likely buy several Sonos Ones to improve the sound quality in my larger rooms.

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10 replies

Userlevel 7
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Amazon have only just released the capability to do this in 2018 but the challenge will be that Sonos buffers audio output to ensure smooth and synchronised multi room audio in a different way that Amazon does and so the two systems may not be correctly in sync.
I can understand that but it also sounds like an engineering problem waiting to be solved to me. I hope my comments made it clear that I thought that the Sonos One was a much better sounding Amazon Echo then Amazon Echo and would buy several of them if they can fix that problem. In my use case, multi room audio outweighs the better sound quality.
Userlevel 7
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Yes I agree this is solvable, I suppose the issue I have is that I have some difficulty in seeing why Sonos would dedicate some of their finite development effort to allowing other speakers from other manufactures into their echo system but let's see.
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So, do I understand this thread correctly? My Sonos One w/Alexa works only with that speaker and I CANNOT ask Alexa to play on my Sonos Play 5? 😞
Userlevel 7
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So, do I understand this thread correctly? My Sonos One w/Alexa works only with that speaker and I CANNOT ask Alexa to play on my Sonos Play 5? :(No that is not correct.

You add the Sonos Skill to Alexa and then discover all your sonos devices, that includes all the play series, connect and Playbar/base. You assign each of these to their appropriate room, which you do as part of your Sonos set up anyway.

Then you can say.."Alexa play album x by artist y in the kitchen/lounge/cabin/dining room (Providing the source is Amazon Music or Spotify)
With the Sonos one you don't have to specify the room if you are talking to it, but you can still ask it to play music from another Sonos speaker in another room.
Came across the same issue today, and got some more or less helpful information from Sonos in Twitter FYI.
Userlevel 7
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Sonos has its own multiroom - that's why you buy Sonos.
Came across the same issue today, and got some more or less helpful information from Sonos in Twitter FYI.

Alright, attaching those photos clearly didn’t work. Here we go.
Came across the same issue today, and got some more or less helpful information from Sonos in Twitter FYI.

Alright, attaching those photos clearly didn’t work. Here we go.
Group all speakers into one place (ex...Living Room), then just say "Alexa...Play music in Living Room" and all the speakers grouped into living room will play.