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I see a few questions about whether the sonos outdoor speaker is better than the Sonance Mariner series. I had the same questions as the speakers look pretty much identical. 
 

I called Sonance technical support about this. I was told the sonos product is a “lower end” product. The woofer, for example, uses lower quality items than the Sonance equivalent (I can’t remember exactly what was said, but the construction of the woofer uses a lower quality material, among other technical differences). 
 

I ended up going with the mariner 86 as it was pretty close to the same money for a much higher end speaker (albeit a bit bigger). 

 

 

For the outdoor speakers, the one thing you’re losing is the ability to use connect 3 pair of the sonos/sonance speakers to a single amp, without an impedence matching switch.  For the in ceiling/wall sonos/sonance speakers, you also gain the ability to do trueplay tuning.

So in layman’s terms, by getting the sonos outdoor set instead of the Sonance mariners you get:

 

  1. Worse construction;
  2. no trueplay (trueplay only works for the  indoor architecturals);
  3. significantly more expensive for a lower end Sonance speaker; and
  4. can run 3 instead of 2 pair of the Sonance.  This is done by limiting the output when it detects the sonos version. 
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