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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K

KumarAuthor

@chickentender : Basically, if any new Sonos product, whenever bought in future, was added to the legacy system if Sonos made that addition possible, it would have no new i.e post legacy feature that would work - Hi Res then would be just one of these foregone.

Which raises a very intriguing point for the Alexa Sonos integration for integrating split systems: if via Alexa groups, using the Alexa app, a legacy product, and a modern product carrying subsequent to legacy date upgrades( including Hi Res capability if released) and which was on a split system, were to made a part of one group via Alexa, music play on both in perfect sync would then be possible?!

If so, it would be Amazon doing for Sonos something that Sonos has given up on:-)).

And that Hi Res enabled speaker could also play Hi Res files in standalone mode or along with other Hi Res speakers in the split system, with Amazon Alexa the cloud based bridge connecting the two systems when the whole system was required to play together for parties or such.

@Ryan S : care to comment?

Majik

Which is why this thread is about non Sonos ways ahead, once the legacy products die.

The hardware of the legacy products I don’t see them to die at all :wink:

But until then I would hope to see an open standard for in house audio distribution where you can mix and match devices from different manufactures and pick the software to your needs. Similar to the home automation standards. Then you are not locked in to a specific ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and you are going to have oodles of 3rd party solutions.

And that isn’t unreasonable in the longer term. And the original purpose of our Patent systems was to provide a route towards this whilst also protecting some of the interests of inventors. Yes, this system has been abused over recent decades (largely by armies of lawyers working for behemoth tech companies or, worse, patent troll companies) but the fundamental view that we should protect inventors from having their ideas stolen and exploited by others is still important. Without that we stifle innovation.

Sonos does have inventions in this case, which are protected by patents. 15 years ago no-one was doing properly synced multi-room digital audio. Others tried and failed. Sonos were the first to come up with ways to make it work.

Now there are ways that an industry standard can emerge but, if it involves patented Sonos technology then it’s up to Sonos whether they decide to licence it to that end or not. Longer term (in about 5 years time, I think) their key patents will expire and, I suspect, open standards will start to emerge. It doesn’t surprise me that Sonos are being aggressive in protecting their IPR at this time, especially given their success in the space over the last decade.

Cheers,

Keith

chickentender

@chickentender : Basically, if any new Sonos product, whenever bought in future, was added to the legacy system if Sonos made that addition possible, it would have no new i.e post legacy feature that would work - Hi Res then would be just one of these foregone.

Which raises a very intriguing point for the Alexa Sonos integration: if via Alexa groups, using the Alexa app, a legacy product, and a modern product carrying subsequent to legacy date upgrades( including Hi Res capability if released) and which was on a split system, were to made a part of one group via Alexa, music play on both in perfect sync would then be possible?!

If so, it would be Amazon doing for Sonos something that Sonos has given up on:-)).

And that Hi Res enabled speaker could also play Hi Res files in standalone mode or along with other Hi Res speakers in the split system, with Amazon Alexa the cloud based bridge connecting the two systems when the whole system was required to play together for parties or such.

@Ryan S : care to comment?

Yowsuh! I think I have to re-read that one in the morning. :joy:
I read it twice and am still not sure I followed but i think I know where you’re going.
(It’s 1:56am here and I am officially overdone. Catch you again.)

Majik

For what seems like forever, Sonos has maintained that “there is no science behind Hi Res”, which contains the 96/24 things referred to in the quote. And therefore Sonos will not incorporate that in its speakers.

...

Now the Sonos quote above seems for the first time to be opening a window to the possibility of Hi Res Sonos speakers to be released after the legacy products are left behind in May. No more than a small opening to be sure, just a chink, but till now that window was firmly shut.

Bear in mind “hi res support” may not be the ability to render hi-res, but the ability to handle (and down-sample) hi-res formats. That would be an entirely reasonable thing to do if there were enough streaming sites and enough users with hires formats out there to justify catering to them.

And, frankly, t would probably be enough to satisfy the majority of the market, who seem to think that hi res formats will magically transform their moderately priced speakers used in an acoustically untreated living room in their noisy apartment into a high-end recording studio listening room).

;)

Cheers,

Keith

K

KumarAuthor

@Majik agreed and more:-). I have been saying for years over here that why does Sonos not bring in - to use the TV jargon - a HD Ready player that transcodes on the fly with a slightly higher buffer if needed and plays the music on HD files, that can then also be played in synch when grouped with present version players that are not HD Ready.

Every time I have been shouted down by the gurus here that this transcoding is a waste of resources and far better to downsample downloaded HD files offline as a one time effort and let these be used to serve Sonos. While correct from a engineering standpoint, this does not work for many customers who don't know how to do this downsampling, or don’t want to, but just want to be able to play their HD files and be able to drink that Kool-Aid. The use of which word should tell you that I agree with your second paragraph too.

F

FarFromGruntled

Lyricist III

@chickentender : Basically, if any new Sonos product, whenever bought in future, was added to the legacy system if Sonos made that addition possible, it would have no new i.e post legacy feature that would work - Hi Res then would be just one of these foregone.

Which raises a very intriguing point for the Alexa Sonos integration for integrating split systems: if via Alexa groups, using the Alexa app, a legacy product, and a modern product carrying subsequent to legacy date upgrades( including Hi Res capability if released) and which was on a split system, were to made a part of one group via Alexa, music play on both in perfect sync would then be possible?!

If so, it would be Amazon doing for Sonos something that Sonos has given up on:-)).

And that Hi Res enabled speaker could also play Hi Res files in standalone mode or along with other Hi Res speakers in the split system, with Amazon Alexa the cloud based bridge connecting the two systems when the whole system was required to play together for parties or such.

@Ryan S : care to comment?

I’ve got a question for those of you who’ve been looking at alternatives.

I’ve got Sonos in two locations: one legacy (Play:5 Gen 1 and Play:3s) and one modern (Playbar and Play:3s).

If services start to disappear from the legacy system I’m happy I can replace them with Raspberry Pi+media software+DAC->Line-in on Play:5 Gen 1).

My modern system however has no line-in and I’d like to tinker with adding one. Has anybody here any experience with using Toslink-in to Playbar from, say, a Toslink-enabled DAC?

Just planning for the long-term as all my hardware is working perfectly.

K

KumarAuthor

@FarFromGruntled : your post conveys that you are ok running split systems. If that is the case, why worry about the playbar at this time? Sitting in a modern system, it will keep getting every update.

And for the legacy system, there are many simpler options to fix the loss of services like Echo or Chromecast that can be wired to the line in on the 5. Unless you want to dabble for the heck of it.

F

FarFromGruntled

Lyricist III

@FarFromGruntled : your post conveys that you are ok running split systems. If that is the case, why worry about the playbar at this time? Sitting in a modern system, it will keep getting every update.

And for the legacy system, there are many simpler options to fix the loss of services like Echo or Chromecast that can be wired to the line in on the 5. Unless you want to dabble for the heck of it.

You’re right of course, and I’ve got a CCA that will do the job for the legacy system. You’re also right about the Playbar, but I just wondered how long we would have before the modern system becomes legacy v2. Once bitten, twice shy.

As I said, I’m planning for the long-term. I quite enjoy dabbling, but I’d rather not if I don’t have to, so my question about Toslink was as much for academic interest as anything else.

K

KumarAuthor

Yowsuh! I think I have to re-read that one in the morning. :joy:
I read it twice and am still not sure I followed but i think I know where you’re going.
(It’s 1:56am here and I am officially overdone. Catch you again.)

Lol. I know the feeling.

I think this cloud bridge between legacy and modern systems using Amazon Alexa groups should work, but I cannot test it because Sonos has not brought the Alexa integration to India. In the Alexa app, one can group devices in a way that permanently (unless changed later) assigns any single Echo device to speakers that Alexa recognises and shows in the Alexa app; or many such can be assembled and assigned as a group by checking boxes next to Alexa discovered speakers. Any command by voice to the Echo device then gets music to play in sync without having to say more than “Alexa, Play such and such music”, via something in the cloud that streams this music to all checked box speakers, in sync. So, if the Alexa app is able to see Sonos speakers in a legacy system, as well as those in a modern system, checking boxes for both speakers while making a group should get the job done, thanks to Amazon tech extending a shake hand to Sonos servers.

No more split systems then, where Echo devices are deployed. This won’t work for NAS music play of course, because Amazon does not support that play.

Again, this one is for @Ryan S to have at!

K

KumarAuthor

@FarFromGruntled : in that case - and I don't know playbar so assuming that it has an optical input, what you want is the opposite of a DAC, you want a ADC. That accepts analog inputs from the CCA/Echo or such and supplies digital outputs to the playbar.

Playbar owners to correct me if this is not a workable thing. But the need for this event may even become moot by a playbar hardware failure before the needs arises, if the legacying of the bar is far enough in the future.

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