Contributor I

Sonos Speakers, Echo Speakers, and Amazon

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 15, 2021
7 replies
335 views

It’s painful that I cannot group Sonos speakers and other speakers in the same room at the same time inside the Alexa app. I have many more non-Sonos speakers than Sonos speakers. I hate that I have to use an Echo Dot and play sound through that. It’s frustrating. Can someone from Sonos provide reasoning behind this?

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jgatie

Nobody from Sonos is going to answer, but the answer is they use two very different technologies to sync up.

J

John B

Sonos is a multiroom audio system with patented synching technology and a controller app (and much more besides, of course). That's the product on offer. You either buy into the ecosystem or you don't.

Ken_Griffiths

@jason-gaylord,
Here’s a thought… Play music on the Alexa ‘Everywhere’ Group in the Amazon Alexa App and setup one echo-dot in that group as Bluetooth ‘paired’ with the new Sonos Roam to output the playing (grouped) audio on that device.

Next, group the Roam with the Sonos devices (on the same S2 HH/WiFi connection) via the Sonos App… you’ll probably get the audio to play on all products, but I would get prepared to anticipate audio dropouts and perhaps expect the playing audio to drift out-of-sync between devices, as there’s nothing that will keep them in sync between the two different manufacturer technologies, but it may (possibly) play to all…

I certainly don’t recommend the above suggestion by the way, but if you want to try it, the option is there, I guess?

ratty

@jason-gaylord,
Here’s a thought… Play music on the Alexa ‘Everywhere’ Group in the Amazon Alexa App and setup one echo-dot in that group as Bluetooth ‘paired’ with the new Sonos Roam to output the playing (grouped) audio on that device.

Next, group the Roam with the Sonos devices (on the same S2 HH/WiFi connection) via the Sonos App… you’ll probably get the audio to play on all products, but I would get prepared to anticipate audio dropouts and perhaps expect the playing audio to drift out-of-sync between devices, as there’s nothing that will keep them in sync between the two different manufacturer technologies, but it may (possibly) play to all…

They’d be way out of sync from the outset. The Echo group might be in sync within itself; the Sonos group would be in sync; but the SBC Bluetooth connection would cause the Sonos group to lag behind by 200-300ms. There’d be a horrible echo (excuse the pun).

As for the original query

It’s painful that I cannot group Sonos speakers and other speakers in the same room at the same time inside the Alexa app. I have many more non-Sonos speakers than Sonos speakers. I hate that I have to use an Echo Dot and play sound through that. It’s frustrating. Can someone from Sonos provide reasoning behind this?

Simple: if third party speakers could play in perfect sync with Sonos units, where’s the incentive to buy Sonos instead of a cheap alternative? Their business would bleed away.

Ken_Griffiths

They’d be way out of sync from the outset. The Echo group might be in sync within itself; the Sonos group would be in sync; but the SBC Bluetooth connection would cause the Sonos group to lag behind by 200-300ms. There’d be a horrible echo (excuse the pun).(Ha Ha.. 😂)

So only for a case where the echo devices are in a completely different room to the Sonos products then, but still not something I would advocate anyway.

melvimbe

It’s painful that I cannot group Sonos speakers and other speakers in the same room at the same time inside the Alexa app. I have many more non-Sonos speakers than Sonos speakers. I hate that I have to use an Echo Dot and play sound through that. It’s frustrating. Can someone from Sonos provide reasoning behind this?

painful? I bet Sonos will be able to play in sync with echos when Google and Apple products can. Or perhaps when you can use echo in a Google speaker group, or airplay from your iphone to an echo. Or perhaps when Amazon allows Sonos to control echos with the Sonos app.

Danny

K

Kumar

It’s painful that I cannot group Sonos speakers and other speakers in the same room at the same time inside the Alexa app. I have many more non-Sonos speakers than Sonos speakers. I hate that I have to use an Echo Dot and play sound through that. It’s frustrating. Can someone from Sonos provide reasoning behind this?

You could ask this of the other speaker makers and also not get any answer - fundamentally, if you want grouped play you have to go with one ecosystem.

Using an Echo Dot via line in jacks on Sonos will leave the Sonos speakers out of sync with, for example, a grouped Dot wired to a stereo amp+speaker zone.

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