Sonos is forcing people to buy new hardware as they've broken the Connect:Amp and they refuse to fix it

I wish it were as complicated as that, when it was really two simple things 1) The powers that be are cheap, and 2) Nobody high up wants to make a decision, so the void is filled by idiot sycophants.

As to your last point, like Sonos, a significant portion of my work is embedded, so we are always concerned about efficiency.  As far as the cost of processing and storage, like any other industry, as resources expand, so does the usage of those resources.  Cheaper/faster processing and storage aren’t the direct cause of so called “bloat”, and it’s really more the tools used rather than laziness of the developers.  Modern languages use more resources, that’s a fact.  The debugging tools available today are 100x what I was doing with inserted printf() statements back in college, and the industry is better for it.  But those things take up space and/or processor cycles. 

As to Sonos’ sound quality?  I watched Mission Impossible: Dead Reconning on an Arc/surrounds/Sub system last night, and not only was it far better sound than my Playbar/surrounds/Sub from a decade ago, it was better than my receiver/satellites/sub from 5 years ago.  Part of that was the mix and addition of Atmos, but regardless, it was outstanding.  I also prefer a pair of Ones and a Sub to my pair of Play:5’s and Sub from a decade ago.  YMMV.

I don’t know the current “rule of thumb”, but at one point programmer productivity was calculated at about six lines of code per hour. Sure, you might be able to jot down a few hundred lines of code in that hour, but there was prior planning, flow charting, and such, then testing and documenting. You haven’t actually been “productive” until the package is operational and deployed. Now, these six lines can pull together many, many man years of coding.

In the consumer area there is a demand for “free support forever”. This is very attractive for consumers, but it’s not a great long term business model for a company. Eventually, more resources will be expended for “free support” than developing new products that generate sales to fund the “free support”.

Audio equipment is in a unique niche. We have become accustomed to buy once and use forever. Lots of equipment from the ‘60s ‘70s and before is still functional for playing records, CD’s, listening to the radio and even playing audio from a cable box. We shouldn’t try throw a system like SONOS in to this bin because standards are rapidly changing and few potential customers will want to buy 70’s technology because it lacks current features in demand, features now required to sell equipment. Witness the number of posters in this Community who are incredulous that ten year old SONOS designs are not equipped with Bluetooth.

My Sonos gear has outlasted two “other brand” AVR systems.

My old non-computerized audio stuff from the 80s is still in service, now with the grandson.

I agree and here is another data point - when I quit audiophile pursuits in 2011 I gifted one of my stereo amps and speaker pair, Rotel+KEF bought in 2002, to my daughter for her home. This past festive season at a party at her home, the sound was thunderous enough to drive the dancing, distortion free. And later, do just as well while playing classic jazz from the golden years of jazz including 1959. But this system of 2002 vintage had been brought completely up to date by just adding an Echo Show 8 playing Spotify, wired to an audio in pair of jacks on the Rotel. Song selection by voice command, ditto volume control, with album art for the song being played visible on the Show, and the sound was brilliant because the speakers are very capable in the large enough enclosures needed for drivers of that time. In 2015, updation had been done by a Connect that was surplus with me, but when the Echo Show and Spotify became available, my daughter found Sonos to be obsolete for her needs and returned the Connect to me.

That Connect now does duty for me to use an Echo Show 8 to drive a play 1 pair + Sub, via the line in jacks on Connect. Most of my listening is by casting from the Spotify app on my phone to the Sonos set up via the Echo Show. Where neither S1 nor S2 is relevant. The only time I use S1 is when I want to play music from my local NAS. But the Sonos hardware at the pointy end, the play 1 pair + Sub, optimised by true play, is as good as I need it to be, even when the listening is in the near field, late at night. Sonos hardware is built to very high standards, I find, for both SQ and service life.

Occasionally I swap around the set up for this zone for a Connect Amp with the Sub, and a Quad speaker pair. There is very little to differentiate the sound I get from either set up - the Sub brings the play 1 pair up to the sound that the Quads can do minus Sub. When Sub is used for both set ups, midrange from Sonos and Quad is very close to excellent.

I therefore find this S1/S2 to just be a distraction that does not disturb my world.

I am not surprised; I have seen amps from HiFi brands like NAD failing far too early these days and there is very little service available. Quad is perhaps rare in still supporting kit that is decades old, but their service centre is only in the UK. Shipping costs can therefore be high.

When I bought Sonos, I expected 7-8 years of service life based on its price point; much of my Sonos is now ten plus years old, and I now expect another 5 years from it!

I just want to add my name to this issue.  I know I had initially posted elsewhere so apologies for posting here also.  I’m not usually active in these forums and I’m usually very good at resolving my own IT issues.  What I hadn’t noticed was the bloody obvious, that it is the 3 Connect:Amps with the issues and the 2 modern Amps are solid.  All running S2
 

Everyone excepts the C:Amps are not cutting edge kit but their age shouldn’t enter into the equation when the issues appear to be resulting from a firmware push.  IMHO anyway.

Andrew 

@Andrew-s : my comments

1. Home audio is settled tech and does not need cutting edge. Streamed audio from the net was the last innovation here, and even that is now settled tech. As is wireless grouped play.
2. Spending GBP 2000 to deal with a Sonos blunder is not a good idea that will suit everyone.
3. Sonos has accepted their mistake and have said they are working to fix this on highest priority. However that does not tell you if and when you may expect the fix.
4. Your immediate fix is to roll those Connect Amps back to S1. Yes, that means that they will no longer play as a part of the S2 system, and I suspect that your modern amps cannot be rolled back to S1. If they could, that would be a complete fix for you if your modern amps are not being used for TV audio. This fix will work better for some users than others, based on the mix of S1/S2 units in their systems.
5. As a minimum Sonos should allow you to roll back S2 to before the version that broke your Connect Amps. I have no idea if they will enable this solution; you can roll back to S1 but you cannot roll back within S2 unfortunately. The issue with this solution will be a loss of any further S2 enhancements but IMO these will be of dubious value. The bigger problem is accidentally upgrading a rolled back S2 system sometime in the future and breaking the Connect Amps again.

Thanks Kumar.

i think that the key thing here is that this is no longer speculative, as it has been acknowledged by Sonos and we have to take their word that a fix is urgently being looked into.

i can live with it for now, with the occasional reboot to get things stable again.  Swapping out for a new Amps would be a last resort (though I’d settle for a boosted upgrade <hint><hint>😋).

Andrew 

Another thread says that there has been an update today that should perhaps fix things for you and others in the same boat.

More on said update, using unedited words from Sonos Staff elsewhere today:

we're close to releasing an update that fixes certain conditions with older players. I still recommend that you do not get your hopes up, however, as things will still likely vary on a device-by-device basis.