According to Australian Consumer Law a consumer must be able to get products repaired or replaced if the product develops a Major Fault, even in the product is well past the “Warranty period”. The rights extend as long as the product should reasonably be expected to last.
These rights are outlined here: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Warranties%20and%20refunds%20-%20a%20guide%20for%20consumers%20and%20business.pdf
The definition of a Major Fault outlined as follows:
What makes a product problem major
A major problem means the product:
- is unsafe
- is very different from the description or sample
- has either one serious problem or several smaller problems that would stop someone buying the product if they knew about them beforehand
- can’t be used for its normal purpose, or another purpose the consumer told the seller about before they bought it, and can’t easily be fixed within a reasonable time.
I’ve emphasised the last two dot points, because ever since the May app update, I think both have applied to my Sonos system.
- The app to date remains laggy, slow and frequently loses parts of my system. Controlling the speakers is therefore painful and frustrating - even when they’re “working”.
- About 20% of the albums I try to load using YouTube music will simply never play via the Sonos app or webcontroller. These albums used to play fine on the old Sonos app, they play fine natively through YouTube Music, I can Airplay them to the Sonos system using my wife’s iPhone and I can even sometimes get my Google Assistant to load them up (but that assistant struggles with my Aussie accent, so its a bit like gambling).
To attempt to rectify this I’ve tried:
- Resetting individual speakers
- Re-installing the app on multiple devices
- Re-Authorising YouTube Music
- Replacing my Wifi Router and setting up a new Wifi-network
- Re-Authorising YouTube music again after setting up the network
- Wasting over an hour on the phone to Sonos support.
If this had been my experience when I bought the system, they would have been packed back into boxes and sent back to Sonos within a week. Alas, this happened a long while later after previously enjoying the system immensely.
Unfortunately, despite numerous emails and calls to Sonos asking about enforcing my rights under Australian Consumer Law - no one working for the company has done so much as acknowledge the existence of Australian Consumer Law, let alone offer me any kind of pathway to actually getting my system refunded - because lets face it Sonos has proved it isn’t capable of fixing the problems in a reasonable timeframe.
So the question goes out to the community. Has anyone had any luck with this in Australia or with similar rights in other countries? How did you go about this?