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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D

DK_Madsen

Enthusiast II

@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.

The playbar is right now 7 years old and thus, ripe for a “2. gen” so right now i would think it could be superseeded any day and so only live on for 5 years from now .

K

KumarAuthor

Sonos continues to make the news for the wrong reasons, now for disclosing customer email addresses to each other:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51315460

This reminds me of what Queen Elizabeth said at the end of 1992 to describe a year that saw the famous Princess Diana interview on BBC, and ended with Windsor Castle catching fire : Annus Horribilis.

Spence has seen similar in just month one of twelve in 2020.

melvimbe

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.

Sonos and Alexa integrate in a one to one relationship. That is that the Sonos app is given your single Alexa/Amazon account to connect to, and the Alexa apps (through the Sonos skill) is given your single Sonos account. In order for your cloud bridge theory to work, Alexa would need to be able to see your legacy and modern system speakers all under the same Sonos account. I am doubtful that will happen, but things could change between now and May.

But that is not the only problem. You would also need the Alexa groups to be capable of sending audio to more than one speaker system at a time. As it stands right now, it does not look like it can. I can’t do a full test as I only have two systems, Sonos and Alexa/echos. What I can tell you that if I cannot set Sonos speakers and echo speakers as preferred speakers in the same Alexa group. It stands to reason that the same would apply for 2 Sonos systems (if that is possible).

Even if the two points above aren’t a problem, the two systems are not going to play in sync. There isn’t any real ‘bridge’ going on here. Alexa is simply passing instructions on to Sonos (thorugh API)to play audio directly from the source. So for this scenario, you’d be passing two sets of instructions to two different systems that aren’t aware of any need to try and sync with the other system.

Again, things could change between now and May, but I think these will be real hurdles to deal with, that would require significant changes by both Sonos and Amazon. I actually think that if there were to be any sort of bridge between legacy and modern, Sonos would try and do it on thier own, and at the local level, without cloud involvement. I am NOT saying they will do this or even that I think they will.

Danny

K

KumarAuthor

@melvimbe ; I have read your response and am looking forward to see what @Ryan S has to say about my thinking on the cloud bridge as a way to integrate split systems.

M

MikeOinToronto

Lyricist III

I am curious what people think about the use of something like Spotify connect as the centre piece to their listening. I know it would not work for everyone but I am just thinking out loud wondering if it would be a logical idea for someone who only uses streaming for their music listening.

I currently use Deezer rather than Spotify so I may be misunderstanding how Spotify Connect works. Also I know Spotify does not do CD quality. Also I have had sound quality issues with Spotify in the past that I believe have less to do with the bit rate than something in my configuration (ie. Amazon at the same bit rate sounded fine while spotify was fairly harsh).

So those caveats aside the primary lesson from this recent sonos announcement is that regardless of what happens i do not want to be tied into a single ecosystem of a hardware/software manufacturer for my music. Their profits increase in theory by the obsolescence of our systems.

So why tie in to a Spotify environment? Quite simply they are in the content business. It is in their economic interest to make it as easy as possible to access their content.

If I correctly understand, once configured any devices using Spotify connect stream directly from their servers to the device. So unlike say Bluetooth, I am not streaming from a phone and killing my battery, the Spotify app just controls changes.

Also, many products can become a Spotify connect end point so not tied to one manufacturer.

Can use dumb speaker/amp/active monitors etc. and just buy a cheap Spotify end point device that only needs to do WiFi and Spotify connect.

Finally, the Spotify app contains all the features so not reliant on hardware companies for updates.

I am curious if anyone has any thoughts on this approach? I may be off in my understanding of Spotify connect so I am hoping more serious Spotify users can comment.

K

KumarAuthor

@MikeOinToronto I have no issues with Spotify sound quality and Spotify connect via either Sonos or Chromecast works fine for me. I am not familiar with any Spotify hardware though, so I can't answer your question but don't see any reason why it can't work as you suggest. That is how echo devices work, and these can also do multi room sync. Can Spotify connect hardware do that?

K

KumarAuthor

@MikeOinToronto as far as I know, the spotify app can cast only to one speaker visible in the Spotify app at one time.

M

MikeOinToronto

Lyricist III

@MikeOinToronto I have no issues with Spotify sound quality and Spotify connect via either Sonos or Chromecast works fine for me. I am not familiar with any Spotify hardware though, so I can't answer your question but don't see any reason why it can't work as you suggest. That is how echo devices work, and these can also do multi room sync. Can Spotify connect hardware do that?

I am not sure if it can do multi room sync. I don't currently use Spotify but tried it a couple of times before settling on deezer. I seem to recall you can check multiple end points but I may be wrong. This wouldn't be the end of the world for me if not possible as I only listen one room at a time.

I am currently using sonos and echo devices throughout the house. But if the Spotify app becomes the central point of my system, Google, echo and many other vendor devices could be used and Spotify would be agnostic to the hardware in a sense. I like this as an idea. I probably should sign up for Spotify premium for a month and play around with it but I am also curious if others have adopted this approach.

K

KumarAuthor

As I said it works fine for me and working through Chromecast it renders artwork on the tv screen as well. As well as via Fire sticks.

And the app control interface can be via either a phone or a computer.

But you can also do this via the Amazon music app and your echos will do multi room sync plus voice as well. So, why Spotify?

M

MikeOinToronto

Lyricist III

As I said it works fine for me and working through Chromecast it renders artwork on the tv screen as well. As well as via Fire sticks.

And the app control interface can be via either a phone or a computer.

But you can also do this via the Amazon music app and your echos will do multi room sync plus voice as well. So, why Spotify?

I guess I would say two theoretical reasons why Spotify over just using the Alexa app. First the idea that Spotify connect allows each device to stream directly from spotify's servers. This may be more of a theoretical advantage than practical. Second, I could add a Google home and numerous other vendors hardware and Spotify will not care. If I use Alexa I am tied into the Amazon environment. Although unlikely, what stops Amazon from obsoleting all their old echo devices. Since Spotify is a content provider, it makes sense to me that they have a financial incentive to make the Spotify app and protocol as accessible as possible to as many hardware vendors as possible.

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