I know that the “associated product” is the first speaker that responds when starting a controller. I’m simply expressing some frustration at how rudimentary that process is and how annoying it can be when you have a lot of Sonos products that you’ve accumulated for about a decade. I have a mix of about a dozen speakers, with my oldest being ten year old Play:1s and my newest being an Arc. I notice that my Sonos controllers (both desktop and Android) are much, much more responsive when the associated product is the Arc or the newer Five. However, my controllers seem to have a knack for finding one of the older Play:1s. The phone and desktop controllers consistently find the oldest speakers in my system when starting up and they’ll be sluggish and the queue is harder to manage. When the associated product is one of the speakers I’ve added within the last couple years, the controller is much more responsive. It’s a stark contrast.
Like I said, I know how the associated product selection process works. I already tried searching the community to see if there’s a better option than just repeatedly closing and reopening the controller until it finally connects to one of the newer speakers. I would be happy with an option to manually refresh the associated products without having to close the app, but I would love being able to select the associated product after having reconnected to the system. This would get me closer to being a Sonos zealot again. When somebody asks me how I feel about my Sonos ecosystem now, I usually invoke the sunk cost fallacy. I’m in too deep and not sufficiently dissatisfied to look elsewhere. Yet.
Has anyone figured out a better way to manage this? This might seem like a minor gripe, but since the controller is how you interact with the system. It’s a suboptimized aspect of the UX. Since I think Sonos fancies itself as a tech company, I figured I might resonate better.
Be careful, Sonos. You’re well on your way to being the Logitech of speakers, with decent hardware and terrible software.