Amazon Dot and Play 5 line in going quiet when replying from Alexa

sjsvitenko, there are a couple things I'd like to pin down here. First off, the Sonos One is in the same room as the PLAYBAR and SUB if they're all bonded together as a surround sound setup, so if you're in that room and you say "Alexa" it should all duck down with the current design.

Secondly, when the Dot upstairs hears Alexa, the PLAYBAR will duck (and so will the other players bonded in that room), because the PLAYBAR doesn't know that it has a Sonos One in the room.

One big however though, if you're playing the TV audio on the PLAYBAR, it shouldn't duck at all. If it's playing music or any other source, it would.

Finally, in answer to your question, if you turn off the Alexa Skill for Sonos, the Sonos One will still be able to use skills and basic features, but not control what's playing on Sonos devices. It'd be one of those things where we don't recommend it, and it may have some funny quarks since it's not an intended use. But you're welcome to give it a shot and see what you think.

Thanks Ryan—I appreciate the reply! You are correct on the One’s being bound to the Playbase and Sub all in the same room. I have no issues with all Sonos in the same room ducking—that would be the right behavior. It is the ducking in a downstairs room when anyone talks to Alex upstairs that really needs to change. I know it’s being worked on, so I’ll let that work itself out and stay tuned here for developments. For the last part, using the Sonos Ones without the Alexa is certainly not what I want long term either, but if the Sonos Ones can essentially replace my Echo downstairs for a while, while ducking gets sorted out, I’m okay waiting a bit for that. Thanks again!

Ryan S - To confirm I have a Sonos One (love it so far) and echo dots some with line in. If I disable the alexa skill my line in will work (and no ducking problem) and I can still use Alexa with the Sonos One? With the skill disabled how does the One know its my Alexa account?

I like having the Dot on my Play 5 as I have a big room the One won't cut it but I want the flash briefings etc to come out the Play 5. In another room I have the One.

The ducking thing is driving the family mad as we use Alexa a lot and also have Sonos in most rooms.

Will play around today.


sjsvitenko, there are a couple things I'd like to pin down here. First off, the Sonos One is in the same room as the PLAYBAR and SUB if they're all bonded together as a surround sound setup, so if you're in that room and you say "Alexa" it should all duck down with the current design.

Secondly, when the Dot upstairs hears Alexa, the PLAYBAR will duck (and so will the other players bonded in that room), because the PLAYBAR doesn't know that it has a Sonos One in the room.

One big however though, if you're playing the TV audio on the PLAYBAR, it shouldn't duck at all. If it's playing music or any other source, it would.

Finally, in answer to your question, if you turn off the Alexa Skill for Sonos, the Sonos One will still be able to use skills and basic features, but not control what's playing on Sonos devices. It'd be one of those things where we don't recommend it, and it may have some funny quarks since it's not an intended use. But you're welcome to give it a shot and see what you think.

Started happening to me today after installing Sonos One. Must be related to the required software update. How has this not been solved 21 days later? And the Sonos One installation is terribly complicated and doesn't support Spotify. WTF

Ryan S - To confirm I have a Sonos One (love it so far) and echo dots some with line in. If I disable the alexa skill my line in will work (and no ducking problem) and I can still use Alexa with the Sonos One? With the skill disabled how does the One know its my Alexa account?
With the skill disabled, the Sonos One still knows that it's an Alexa device, and therefore should be able to keep on playing music to itself and perform basic functions. I will say that this isn't an intended use so there could be issues performance wise. It may work great for you, but I can't promise that.

So I have my Dots set up with no physical connection to the Sonos. The Sonos skills are active. When anyone talks to the Dot, any Sonos playing will duck.
The ability to turn this off would be appreciated.
To resolve it for now, I’ve had to turn off the skill. Alexa still knows that the Sonos devices are there, but won’t communicate with them.

I just enabled this new skill today and am generally very pleased with the features. The ducking issue is a disappointment. I suggest giving users the ability to disable ducking. My Dots don't really have much trouble hearing me with the music up anyway. I'd be very happy with the ducking feature disabled as a user choice, or just gone if making it optional isn't as easy as I assume it is.

I'd agree -ducking as a user option would be the best thing. I can see why it's implemented, and it's a good feature, but not everyone wants that behaviour - I don't.

It drives me nuts that Sonos engineers refer to the audio jack on the Amazon Echo as a "Line In". It is no such thing. It is a audio line OUT - meaning the Echo is the source of audio and instead of audio playing through it's built-in speaker, it goes OUT to whatever speaker is attached to the LINE OUT!

It drives me nuts that Sonos engineers refer to the audio jack on the Amazon Echo as a "Line In". It is no such thing. It is a audio line OUT - meaning the Echo is the source of audio and instead of audio playing through it's built-in speaker, it goes OUT to whatever speaker is attached to the LINE OUT!

Could you point to an instance of this? I've only seen the line-in on the Sonos device referred to as a line-in, because that is what it is. Being Sonos representatives, they are Sonos centric, and therefore refer to the method of connecting the line-out on a Dot to the line-in on a Sonos device as "the line-in method".

Likewise. I have the exact same problem on both my CONNECT:AMPs. Is there a fix for this?