My guess would be that this rumor actually has some basis in fact, but as it was passed on from person to person, it got twisted into something that’s wholly incorrect.
There are several Sonos speakers that are capable of running on both S1 and S2 systems. To name a few, play:1, Sonos One, playbar, play:5, play3, etc. So yes, these speaker can be running on an S1 system, and then upgraded to run on a S2 system. This is not a secret at all. There are also some speakers that are only capable of running on S1, such as the old ZP devices and Connect and Connent:Amp made before a certain date (the exact date, I don’t recall). There is no way that these legacy devices can operate in an S2 system. Of course, Sonos newest products are S2 only.
It’s entirely possible that someone alone the chain of this rumor misunderstood how it works, and possible little understanding of Sonos products at all and started claiming that any device can run on S2….that’s how they interpreted what they were told. Indeed, there really isn’t any such thing S1 or S2 hardware, as S1/S2 designates the operating system, not hardware classification. I don’t think there is any official hardware classifications that Sonos has made, as each product has different hardware with different capabilities, depending on it’s function and the price/availability of hardware at the time the product was released. The closest I’ve heard is referring to S1 only devices as ‘legacy’ while everything else is ‘modern’.
