Is the Sonos ecology just too diverse now?
So, many months on from that event and my Sonos system is still best described as “quirky and unreliable”.
I won’t produce yet another list of things that go wrong, there’s plenty on here already. But every time I open the app now I routinely expect, and get:
- players refusing to join an existing group “try again later”
- the app refusing to control an existing group
- music taking up to 30s to start playing across a group of players (I fondly remember the days when I heard the beginning of the first track in a playlist)
- etc.
All of these are resolved with patience and the digital equivalent of “jiggle it about and try again”. And I usually manage to have a working system that plays my music within about 5-10 minutes of frustration and annoyance at the beginning of every session of playing music. I’ve come to expect it now.
But I’m wondering if one of the problems is that I’ve now got over 20 different players, of pretty much every S2 compatible type, which spans several generations of technology. Am I really trying to get hardware to work together seamlessly that, frankly, just isn’t up to the job?
Now, I know there would be a huge backlash if Sonos came clean and said something like:
“Hands up. If you really want a responsive, controllable, reliable system then don’t mix products between generations. So, for example, never expect a Era 100 to play nicely with a first generation Sonos One, they just aren’t fully compatible”.
But, given that I have got used to there being some “problem” players in my setup and am almost coming to this conclusion myself, might it not be preferable to the current fiction where we’re told everything “should” or “will” work together and constantly being disappointed?