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Question

Parental Controls

  • 20 November 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1567 views

So, I am looking at putting a Sonos speaker in my children’s bedroom. I have quite a range of Sonos products around the house and I don’t want them to have full control of the system. Is it possible to be able to give them access to just the speaker in their bedroom? Like a sub controller from their phones that can only control their speaker but my wife and I still able to control everything?

TIA
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2 replies

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This is a request I and many others have made over the years but Sonos ignore it. I have been a Sonos user since they first came out and have 12 items in my system. The hardware is excellent, and Trueplay is a great addition to the system's sound quality.

However, the app has ALWAYS been the system's weak area. This latest offering is, as many others have voiced, their poorest offering yet. From the perspective of a loyal customer of Sonos my view of the company is that they are extremely arrogant in their opinion that whatever they offer in the app is what people want.

If they took the time to listen to the thousands of customers in the forums who have some excellent suggestions on how the app should present to the user, they would have a decent interface for all. Yes, you can’t please everyone, but as a user of Sonos from the start I am finding the latest v8 app very frustrating and counter-intuitive, which very much detracts from the pleasure I get from using the Sonos system once I have managed to get it to do what I want.

When v8 was announced I was pleased to see that the 'Search' no longer defaulted to 'Artists' regardless of what you were browsing, something that has been the case since forever. To clarify, if you were browsing 'Albums' and couldn’t find what you want, tapping 'Search' would bring up the search feature, but after you’d typed in 'Dark Side of the Moon' it would return nothing, as the app defaulted to searching in 'Artists'. With 8.0 this was fixed.

Sadly, when they started the many updates on v8, the Search has gone back to its old ways.

I wonder if they are trying to write the app with in-house staff who may be very good with hardware design but are useless at software? Time to accept they can’t be good at everything and get some proper app writers in to do the job properly. If they already have dedicated app writers doing it, time to sack them and get someone else in!
I also would greatly appreciate a system of “hierarchy” such that when I am home, I have control over the music and my children cannot change it as they please without approval. Often times, there are “music wars” between them and they continuously change the music from station to station. Having an approval system is highly needed and I’ve been saying this for years since we’ve had the Sonos.