All Sonos products will continue to work past May

Now you’ve lost me. Are you saying that this happened before, and Sonos made products that only worked with wired connections? Or are you speaking hypothetically?

What, exactly, and I mean specifically, is the issue you are referring to? And how, exactly, is wired-to-wireless bridging an unsolvable problem?

Just like the Sonos Bridge used to do, you mean? And how all Sonos products work today? (If you want 32 legacy components each receiving a different audio source then maybe Sonos isn’t the right solution for you. There can be reasonable limits on something like this.)

Why do you think this is a problem? That is how they work now.

Look: a Sonos group has a master and a bunch of slave members. The master pulls in the source stream that you have selected, either from an Internet service, your local music library, or the line input in back (if it has one). That stream is then decoded to audio (unless your source is the line in, in which case, the audio is already there), and then re-encoded for broadcast to the other players in the group along with some metadata that allows the players to synchronize the playback. Those players then decode the audio stream they are receiving, synchronize it with their clocks, and then play.

Sending audio streams around wirelessly has not suddenly gotten more difficult. What has changed is that Sonos wants to do more with their components. Fine. So let them play in the same sandbox. My legacy devices can’t be the master if I want NextBigThing audio stream, but they can still play audio that comes from somewhere else. That’s an acceptable solution to me.

If Sonos wants to update their whole wireless protocol to use something other than WiFi someday, then sell me a bridge device. Or, put the bridging capability in another component (see, for example, the Sonos Bridge: you didn’t need it if you had a Connect or a Play:5, for instance). Or do both. Don’t care which.

I get that Sonos is a business and they’d rather sell me $2000 of new equipment, but what a business wants to do and what a consumer is willing to do are not always aligned. Sometimes, they are very far apart.

People are asking for a mixed service level, not a global downgrade. Is it harder to do? Yes. Is it unsolvable? None of us know, obviously, but given how the products work today the word “impossible” is pretty extreme. It might not be as smooth of an experience as we have today, but those of us on legacy components can figure it out.

Not at all what I said.  Here’s what happens:

You buy a Sonos device that has sat on the shelf for a few software updates.  So its software is out of date, which is akin to “legacy” software.  You take it home and try to add it to the system, and it sits there and blinks at you.  This is because there were some changes to the wireless protocols that are preventing it from connecting.  The standard response when someone ask for help with this scenario is to connect it via Ethernet, add it to the system, let it update to the new software, then disconnect it and it will run wirelessly.

But by definition, the legacy units are always going to be on legacy software, they can’t be updated.  So when the new software makes a protocol change, there’s no way the wireless legacy units are able to communicate.  Even more extreme, very out of date legacy software (and remember, people want their legacy units to work for a long time!) sometimes can’t even connect using Ethernet, they need Sonos support to intervene.  

There’s a difference between a simple network device that just passes data like a basic switch, and one that has to translate the protocols from legacy to modern or modern to legacy for 32 streams at once.

Again, so what? There’s update/install, and then there’s playing audio throughout the zones. I admit that procedure sounds irritating, but playback sounds unaffected. What problem am I solving? Sounds like there’s already a solution to me.

So support a reasonable limit if 32 is too big.

You don’t get it.   There is no update/install, because legacy units, by very definition, have to stay on the legacy software and there is no support for the new protocol changes on the legacy software.  They are stuck with the old software that has no way of connecting to the new! 

These aren’t just audio players, they are smart speakers that need to communicate with each other, and they do that through proprietary protocols that are subject to change.  Change the protocols on one, and you need to change the protocols on all of them.  If you can’t change the protocols on the legacy units, the legacy units can’t talk to the modern units.  If they can’t talk to each other, they can’t play audio together.   They are effectively a split system. 

The system supports 32 separate streams.  If you truly want what you have now to work with the stuff in the future, you need to process 32 streams.  Anything else is just bargaining away the facts, a very bad thing in computer science. 

Personally, I was more surprised by the short lead time, not the announcement itself. An EOL notice with 4 months warning is not very customer friendly, especially when it’s attached to a $2000 bill.

If it was a year, that’d be different for me. I can come up with a reasonable and affordable plan for updating my system (or replacing it) in a year. I can’t do that in 4 months.

Then you should run on legacy mode for that year, and upgrade as you get the funds. 

Well, obviously. That doesn’t mean 4 months lead time is customer-friendly.

On the upside, they are committing to bug fixes and security patches. That does make this less of an issue than it was when the first announcement came out.

Ideally, though? I’d like a service mix, so that old and new can co-exist with new doing its new things, and old supporting old things, and the two capable of grouping together. That isn’t what they are committing to. Which implies that if I buy new things, my new things will only run the old things. Will that be a problem? I don’t know--I can’t predict the future. But given that the post-4 months period is not coming with any guarantees beyond bug fixes, it’s still pretty crappy service.

Defend it all you want, but there is clearly a disconnect between Sonos and its oldest customers. If there wasn’t, we wouldn’t be seeing this much commotion.

This is not an EOL 

You’re being pedantic. They no longer get new features, and they only get emergency fixes. Oh, and keeping them around drags your whole zone down to the lowest common denominator. Close enough.