Line-In Latency/Delay Disable PLAY:5

I’m certainly not deciding it for Sonos. I’m just attempting to look at the issues here objectively.

As a speaker hardware manufacturer, the Home Cinema market with ‘wireless’ surround sound speakers, was a ‘no brainer’ for Sonos from a sales point of view. The demand for it was clearly there before they ventured into that market.

In support, a number of similar speaker manufacturers have taken that same route, due to such demand and it’s perhaps been the same too with portable devices, like the Move, which do have a purpose to take music outside of the home, but also a user is still able to use the Move in the home as part of their wireless multi-room system. The demand for that product with Bluetooth was there too. Again some other ‘similar’ manufactures chose to go down this route aswell. 

At the end of the day it is about demand from the public and ultimately, hardware sales. 

All Sonos products still centre around a multi-room wireless home audio system and a ‘no audio’ delay product simply does not directly fit in with that purpose. The demand for such a Sonos speaker within this community, or elsewhere online, is quite insignificant too, it appears.

There are reports in this community where some Sonos audio dropout issues arise with products running on some (often quite poorly managed) wireless networks, which Sonos have tried to help with, by introducing various ‘group audio delay’ settings to help counteract those dropout issues in order to assist users to obtain a stable platform even in the poorest of WiFi environments. To switch and suddenly introduce a ‘no-delay’ option, seems a rather backward step when looking at the main purpose of their speakers and their continued use in a wireless multi room-speaker system.

Development costs would certainly play a role, because there are many implications when adding ‘no audio’ delay - A user would clearly have to detach the speaker from the rest of the audio system to make it standalone, so it could then not be ‘grouped’, ‘paired’ or ‘bonded’ at all in that state, because otherwise that currently requires some audio delay/buffering and options to keep the audio in sync over a wireless network. 

Sonos could, I guess, create a new standalone speaker to achieve no-delay audio, like they did with the Move in order to take the audio outside the Home and arguably, even that was against the Sonos main purpose, but clearly there was a good deal of customer demand there for such a ‘new’ device to switch between ‘outside’ use and also being part of a multi-room wireless system

There are ‘cheaper’ standalone/wired speakers on the market that do ‘no delay’ line audio already and I don’t personally think it’s an area that Sonos would ever want to step into/compete with, nor do I honestly think that there is any great demand from their customers for them to do this. I just don’t see there being much in terms of any additional speaker/hardware sales either.

This stated earlier in the thread, but the idea that the Tech need for the Five to be ‘no delay’ already exists in the HT equipment isn’t true.  The Five has an analog input, while the HT devices have digital inputs.  That means that the Five would need to convert from analog to digital without delay, or have some sort of bypass mode (analog input to analog speakers) that hardware may not support.  I don’t know.  Regardless, that analog mode would only work when the speaker isn’t playing with any other speaker in the system.  No stereo pairs or sub.

If they did do something like this though, I don’t know that they would necessarily have to lock out groups, just have a mechanism that switches to normal playback when grouped.  I imagine the inability to group without delay defeats the point for a significant portion of people looking for the feature though.

I think Sonos is rather hesitant to create audio devices that are separate from their home audio system.  I get that in some respect, as they don’t want to drift to far from their ‘wheelhouse’ or confuse people buying a standalone speaker they think is part of the system.  On the other hand, it seems like Sonos has a developed a brand name now, and they could make easy income by leveraging that name to make other types of audio devices, same as most other audio companies.

I’m not 100% sure on this.  I certainly have audio needs that Sonos doesn’t currently fill.  If Sonos made other audio equipment, there is a good chance I would buy the Sonos brand based on brand reputation only.

As it happens conversion A-D or D-A is almost instant.

Like all Sonos players the Five has a digital audio pipeline, including decode, volume, EQ and crossover, plus of course Trueplay digital room correction. There can’t be an analog bypass. Notwithstanding the network buffer there will be FIFOs in there which introduce slight delay. (Witness the sync problems some users have with AV receivers which do the same.)

Sonos simply wasn’t engineered for zero latency. It didn’t need to be.

Indeed, it needed not to be.

It sure needs to me now.

It’s a false dichotomy to think the only options are zero latency or annoyingly large latency.    A false dichotomy designed to throw your hands up and say well gee even light has latency, so I guess perfection isn’t possible, so there’s no reason to try.

Nobody wants latency.  I’ll permit 2-5ms.  maybe 10ms, and be ok with calling that good enough.  If I can perceive it with standard human senses, then it’s too much.

Of course, but yours is a use case which, if Sonos cares about it at all, is very low down on the priority list.

My use case?  And when did I ever tell you my use case?

I was responding to the myriad mostly reasonable use cases stated before me.  And it’s not really your place nor Sonos’ to judge how I use a speaker.  You’re not my mother.

We paid for them, we’ll use em how we please thanks!

The idea that line in audio might need to be live because it’s associated with video is pretty common.  And that’s how audio always was before sonos.  You don’t get to just add a mis-feature and not acknowledge it on the box.  Most people at one time or another have hooked up speakers to a tv or computer, or watched a youtube video in a car from their phone.  Live is expected unless they call them “Sonos Non-Live Speakers” or “Sonos Premium Delay Speakers” or some nonsense.

Yet Sonos somehow has cornered the market on excuses to add latency.  Leave it to audiophiles to rationalize why audio lag is actually a good thing!   Bet its harder to notice with some nice sound rocks in the room too. https://www.ebay.com/itm/293943838982?mkevt=1&mkcid=28&chn=ps  which color sounds better?

Leaving aside the hyperbolic verbiage, you implied a use case that required zero/low latency, otherwise why would you post on this thread? 

As for audio in conjunction with video, as has been pointed out countless times Sonos makes home theatre products for just such a purpose. 

We paid for them, we’ll use em how we please thanks!

Products are designed to do what they do. Caveat emptor.

People stop feeding the troll.  

I agree with you for once.  And if they’re designed with a “line-in” port (as opposed to a line-in-with-delay port), they they need to provide line-in without a delay.

Unless what you mean is by definition no product can ever do wrong because what a product does defines what they are designed to do.  Which I’m sure that’s not what you mean, or else recalls, warranties, class actions, wouldn’t exist in this world.  And that would be a terribly flawed logic of course.