Is Sonos S2 a lemon?

I’ve had Sonos for many years.  My system grew to 8 zones and although there would sometimes be problems there was never something that couldn’t be fixed by rebooting everything from my router through switches to wired and wireless Sonos devices.  Hey ho, this is the price we pay for humanity’s early steps to networking Nirvana (which probably won’t be reached in my lifetime!)

Then came news of Sonos S2.  After getting past Sonos’ poor initial communications, and finding that most of my devices were S2 compatible I upgraded the remaining ones and apart from being annoyed that the new Sonos Port is functionally a backwards step (no volume control buttons, no pause/play button, no optical digital output) I was ready to say ‘Hello’ to S2.

I hesitated.

I had a splendid multi-room sound setup feeding both simple speakers and two traditional hifi stereo systems.  I didn’t want a load of hassle.  Life’s too short to spend hours rebooting, deleting and adding components or hanging on the phone to Support.

So I came to this forum.  Oh boy, am I glad I did?!  There appears to be a constant stream of trouble with S2.  But is this representative?  There may be millions of happy S2 users out there, or millions of people pulling their hair out.  Of course it’s mainly those with problems who come here so the bias toward troublesome upgrades may not be representative.

How do I find out?  It appears that reversing from S2 back to S1 isn’t a supported process so I’m very reluctant to ‘give it a go’.

What is the truth?  Is Sonos S2 a lemon?