The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 23, 2020
570 replies
22879 views

I will start this thread with a few caveats:

First, this thread is not for rants. There are plenty here for those, and there is no bar on opening new ones.

Second, the thread is directed for the subset of users that have a large investment in legacy products, and are content to see their Sonos systems as music systems that offer stable streamed music from either a NAS or from the net, and have no expectation of more bells and whistles - just that things continue to work as they are working today. I happen to be in this boat as well, as someone that has three out of six zones running very well on legacy products that I simply cannot afford to jettison until the hardware dies.

Third, this thread is based on facts, some of which have been coming to light only over the last 48 or so hours. It is therefore incomplete to an extent, and may even be wrong in places. Feel free therefore to clarify/correct/add as necessary - and I specifically invite @Ryan S to do so. But, no rants please - they have a place, but this is not it.

All that said, this is the solution I intend to proceed with and recommend here:

Opt for a legacy system operation in May, that will run legacy and modern products, exactly as these run today; no faffing around with two networks. No more enhancements, but expecting Sonos to honestly fulfil their recent promise of all bug fixes that the legacy products can accommodate. Ditto for what needs to be done to accommodate changes driven by at least the mainstream service providers.

By a happy coincidence, all legacy products have line in jacks. So if something even happens at the streaming service end that cannot be accommodated in legacy products, I am confident of finding some device that can be wired to the line in jacks of these, that will still allow streaming from the culprit service to work including in grouped mode with all other products in the system.

The streaming from the local NAS will not have any issues in this mode, other than hardware failures including that of the NAS, and a key assumption here is that NAS changes will not need a Sonos software update.

Although Sonos has said that new products can be added to such a system, I do not see how this is possible once new products come installed with versions that are beyond the frozen legacy system one. Unless Sonos is not going to sell any new products in future with versions beyond the 2020 legacy one - I doubt that. And once a product comes with the latest version, adding it to a legacy system without rendering legacy products inoperable is going to be tricky because it will involve first separating the one system into two; I also admit to being a little fuzzy with this bit. In my case, this is all moot; I have no need for another zone. As an aside, I am someone therefore that is not of much interest to Sonos!

I also assume that if anyone at any time in the future wanted to jettison legacy products for any reason, all they will need to do is leave all such products powered off, invoke updates and the result will be a Sonos system updated to the day they do the invocation. The concern here for me is different - I need to have an ironclad way of NOT updating my system before I am ready to separate or jettison legacy products, and this needs more insights into how things will work on this front in future.

I am pretty sure that this way ahead will work in my use case and I suggest it will also work for many that are heavily invested in Sonos legacy products, that do not want to write it off or to trade up to new products just to retain all existing functionality.

Yes, it involves losing future enhancements/features, but once we accept that these essentially are music boxes that will keep doing all they do today, that should be an acceptable trade off, I suggest. It is to me, for sure.

So this way, this event will be just a minor inconvenience, and I expect to be able to use all my existing products till the hardware fails.

What this event has convince me though is to now look at/recommend smart systems that are truly modular in the sense that the smart bits can be periodically replaced at low cost, while the core “dumb” electronic hardware can be of such build/after sales support, that it justifies the higher investment in the consequent price, if better sound quality is also needed than what the smart front ends can alone provide. But that's for the future.

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A

amun

And hopefully Ryan might get the go-ahead to share a bit of information sooner than May… if for no other reason than to tamp the firestarters a bit (and admittedly I fanned some flame in the first day or so) in these weeks coming. Methinks they doth protest too much.

Just to avoid confusion - whose sincerity are you doubting? Sonos or the firestarters?

Ken_Griffiths

So now, a call to @ratty @buzz and @Majik, Jedi masters of the Sonos galaxy, to step in whenever they can, in any way they can, in response to any post, in furtherance of the objectives of the thread that the title tries to capture. What ever you can do or are still willing to, will have an impact.

Kumar,

Whilst I appreciate the shout-out, I certainly don’t consider myself to be any sort of “Jedi master” of Sonos. In fact I would probably say that, in recent years, I’ve grown a bit out of touch with the newer kit and the kit I have does what I need it to do (at least for the moment).

So, in conjunction with a waning interest in ”dabbling” with my system, the fact that I’m no longer a moderator (thank goodness), changes I made to my online habits a few years ago, and some changes in my working life I no longer feel the need to keep abreast of the latest and greatest in the Sonos world, including the forum chatter, angry mobs, and management fumbles.

If I was still a moderator during the current “fun” I’m really not sure how we would handle it. At the end of the day we didn’t want to censor opinions but, on the other hand, we wanted people to keep conversations reasonably civilised and, ideally rational and objective.

Unfortunately, the mishandling of this situation by Sonos seems to have raised a pitchfork mob, which almost certainly includes people who are wholly ignorant of the situation, but who have been given a whiff of blood and encouraged to “pile in” by sensationalist reporting in the gutter tech press (yes, Verge, I’m looking at you).

I recall this happening before but in much lower profile ways and at a point when Sonos was a much smaller animal, so the often-feigned bile and outrage directed into the forums was manageable.

I’ve not read the threads and probably won’t. But I guarantee there’s people in them who have joined the forum just to take shots at Sonos, and a good proportion of them won’t be Sonos users. Many of those people will have gone through several iterations of iPhone in as many years. #justsayin

That isn’t to say that people don’t have a point. This was really badly handled. I’m not going to speculate on the reasons behind it or whether they’ve could have done it a better way, etc. because I don’t feel qualified to.

As to what is the solution for those with mixed networks? Well I intend to continue to use my 2005-era ZP100’s (and other legacy) alongside some newer equipment I have just as I always have. As long as it largely continues to do what it does today, I really don’t care that much about new features.

I do care about streaming services, although the majority of my Sonos purchases were originally made based on streaming from my home server, and I don’t see that going away. Will there be services that I can’t access? Probably. Do I care? As long as there are some mainstream streaming services which still work for me, or if I can cast in some way, I’m not that bothered.

If it really comes to it I will split my network into two. That’s not ideal, but it will work for me.

If Sonos were to develop the app so you could easily switch between legacy and new installations, I would be happy with that.

To be honest, many of the ZPs in my network rarely get used these days. At some point I may upgrade one or two of my zones to newer kit, but I don’t feel compelled to do so at the moment. The zones where I do most of my listening have the newer devices already.

YMMV

Cheers,

Keith

It’s so refreshing to see from your post, that amongst all the ‘flak’ around here, some common sense still prevails and I have same/similar thoughts Keith, that if I were to divide my Sonos Household into ‘legacy’ and ‘modern’ it would not bother me too much either.. nice if I could achieve 'upstairs' and 'downstairs' separate zones in my home, but whatever setup I have, post May, I’m sure I will cope with any physical divide.

I do still believe the most important aspect of all this for the majority is, I assume, to keep their devices up and running for as long as it is practicable to do so and that we at least feel we have got our ‘money’s worth’, or more, from them. For some that might perhaps be a period of more than 5 to 10 years and for others it seems to be a rather unrealistic expectation period in some cases, but ‘nothing is forever’. 10 years overall is ‘extremely reasonable’ and Sonos has far exceeded that now in some cases.

Nothing in any of the Sonos announcements cause me (personally) any real concern, in fact some things have reassured me greatly, in that Staff say they will do all that is reasonably practical, within their capabilities, to keep the already 'old’ legacy products running for the foreseeable future. I can live with that ‘promise’.

I think we all have to accept that the ‘plugin’ services (external factors) maybe beyond Sonos control, but with some cooperation I don’t see why those services will ever truly want to cut off their own loyal customers anyway.

In regard to the ‘initial’ announcement, I still don’t see any inaccuracies in the message, but it was (without doubt) widely misinterpreted, in a variety of different ways, by many (even done purposely, on occasions, I suspect) ...and the core message got twisted early on in a “Chinese Whisper” (game) kind of way, to the extent that the wrong message was then being conveyed.

It became necessary for Sonos to re-state their message with some additional clarity and reassurance and that has since greatly helped.

What will help further, of course is the detail about the proposal and I’m sure we will get that too in the fullness of time.

The issue that I see now is that people are acting rather impatiently, that’s human nature and want to know everything right now, or they will just continue to stamp their feet, speculate and rumourmonger until they then believe what they want to choose to believe.

Drip feeding Sonos customers pieces of the overall final concept may not now help either and I think Sonos are right to now wait and convey their message in full.

It’s just a pity that some people cannot wait patiently until the all important message arrives in May.

K

KumarAuthor

From Twitter: On Jan. 17, Sonos testified it’s different from Big Tech because (in part) of long-term software updates. On Tuesday, it said it would stop updates in May to old speakers. Now it’s CEO has apologized and said they’ll still give bug fixes.

I was not aware of this Jan 17 testimony - perhaps it was in connection with the Google law suit. Regardless of any nuances in what was said there by Spence, this is very poor timing by him, to cause such a confluence of pronouncements.

And while some may think it wrong, the fact is that today, public perception is shaped by these sound bites.

K

KumarAuthor

@Ryan S : this is something that may be on the Sonos to do list, but it is important enough to nevertheless say it.

The present on going version development is a process that also involves bug creation in which every new development/tweak has bugs in it, that get fixed in the next version along with some tweaking somewhere that causes a bug somewhere else, that then gets fixed and so on and on. Which is irritating, like the present line in level 8 to 10 bug as an example, but no more than that, because these are temporary things that fade in and fade out. But this on going process will get disrupted for the legacy version, with many bugs created but unattended. With fixes promised even after May, but with time frames that may not be as rapid as in the past or as rapid as those for the modern version. It may therefore be a good idea to call a halt on all development releases now, on the basis that Sonos is now as good as it is ever going to get for us legacy lot, and spend the rest of the time till May doing only clean ups and first hunting and then fixing of every known/found bug, and testing to see that this has actually been achieved before the legacy version is forked.

We are happy with Sonos as it is now and it isn't going to matter to anyone what little additional features we will lose out on from now till May if this approach is adopted. And if we are left in ignorance of any such, ignorance is bliss will apply.

I also understand that this may be standard operating procedure in software development, in which case please say you are following it and I will say no more about this matter.

T

train_nerd

Trending Lyricist I

Yes, we do love current functionality and want it to be preserved in Legacy.

Two items on wish-list for legacy version:

1 Fix: Exit SMB1 protocol (long ago identified as not secure) to SMB2/3 for NAS. Really need that fix.

2 Feature: Add album art, all operating systems. Glaring ommision.

jgatie

Yes, we do love current functionality and want it to be preserved in Legacy.

Two items on wish-list for legacy version:

1 Fix: Exit SMB1 protocol (long ago identified as not secure) to SMB2/3 for NAS. Really need that fix.

If they were able to fit the new Linux kernel required for SMB v2 support into the legacy device’s 32 MB, don’t you think they would have done it by now?

chickentender

And hopefully Ryan might get the go-ahead to share a bit of information sooner than May… if for no other reason than to tamp the firestarters a bit (and admittedly I fanned some flame in the first day or so) in these weeks coming. Methinks they doth protest too much.

Just to avoid confusion - whose sincerity are you doubting? Sonos or the firestarters?

Isn’t a matter of sincerity to me. I was talking about the main “clarification” thread and the firestorm there. As Majik mentioned, there are some in there seemingly concerned more about fire-fanning than about solving problems and getting good information. They’re free to. I meant that some more forthcoming detail from Sonos sooner than later could go a long way in dousing the flame.
… or perhaps not.

melvimbe

And hopefully Ryan might get the go-ahead to share a bit of information sooner than May… if for no other reason than to tamp the firestarters a bit (and admittedly I fanned some flame in the first day or so) in these weeks coming. Methinks they doth protest too much.

Just to avoid confusion - whose sincerity are you doubting? Sonos or the firestarters?

Isn’t a matter of sincerity to me. I was talking about the main “clarification” thread and the firestorm there. As Majik mentioned, there are some in there seemingly concerned more about fire-fanning than about solving problems and getting good information. They’re free to. I meant that some more forthcoming detail from Sonos sooner than later could go a long way in dousing the flame.
… or perhaps not.

I’d rather see Sonos take more time to make sure the information they share is solid with no chance of changing between now and May. Since this isn’t just about policy, but how the changes they are promising (the two separate systems and how they are controlled) are technical in nature, I’d want them to be able to go through some test runs and make sure the can deliver first.

Danny

chickentender

And hopefully Ryan might get the go-ahead to share a bit of information sooner than May… if for no other reason than to tamp the firestarters a bit (and admittedly I fanned some flame in the first day or so) in these weeks coming. Methinks they doth protest too much.

Just to avoid confusion - whose sincerity are you doubting? Sonos or the firestarters?

Isn’t a matter of sincerity to me. I was talking about the main “clarification” thread and the firestorm there. As Majik mentioned, there are some in there seemingly concerned more about fire-fanning than about solving problems and getting good information. They’re free to. I meant that some more forthcoming detail from Sonos sooner than later could go a long way in dousing the flame.
… or perhaps not.

I’d rather see Sonos take more time to make sure the information they share is solid with no chance of changing between now and May. Since this isn’t just about policy, but how the changes they are promising (the two separate systems and how they are controlled) are technical in nature, I’d want them to be able to go through some test runs and make sure the can deliver first.

Yeah, that’s precisely the opinion I’ve been coming around to, even as I typed the above post. Agreed.

T

train_nerd

Trending Lyricist I

Yes, we do love current functionality and want it to be preserved in Legacy.

Two items on wish-list for legacy version:

1 Fix: Exit SMB1 protocol (long ago identified as not secure) to SMB2/3 for NAS. Really need that fix.

If they were able to fit the new Linux kernel required for SMB v2 support into the legacy device’s 32 MB, don’t you think they would have done it by now?

Sure hope they would have. Plausible there are technical issues. Plausible it did not reach threshold of fix on resource allocation. I’m not technically skilled enough to know if could run multiple SMB protocols on NAS. Sure would like it if they at least disclose rationale/limits of continued use of obsolete protocol so user can make security assessment and enlightened decision, but I digress. Plausible Sonos path forward fixes this, which sounds like a marketing claim to me…..more secure for NAS users.

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