I love my Sonos speakers - I have a Beam, a Mini Sub, 2 Play 5s, and 2 Era 100s. They sound GREAT. When they work. Enter the Sonos ecosystem… the poor coding, the terrible user experience, the shockingly bad UI. There is nothing more frustrating than a song that cuts out, except one where the speakers play intermittently. Because of this, I loathe Sonos as a company. I am appalled at the seeming hate that the Sonos product mangers, the software engineers, and the company management has for audiophiles; if not, please explain the volume slider that never starts at a synched volume and has to be manually adjusted, explain why SonosNet continually drops out while my WiFi does not but am yet unable to allow the Beam to talk to the Sub and Eras over WiFi? As of now, I no longer caution people who inquire of me if they should buy Sonos, I actively proselytize for anyone and everyone to please make better choices and buy some speakers with a functional ecosystem - again, the speakers sound great and maybe that’s the frustration, because they only sound great on a rare day when the stars align, and it is absolute maddening sh*t the majority of the time when they don’t. They can’t trade on this name forever. This horrid, hodgepodge ecosystem must be addressed… the fixes are so simple, but must start with a removal of those toeing the status quo of their gross negligence.
Sonos Speakers Sound Great, Sonos Ecosystem is the Worst Music Ecosystem in the History of Humankind
+19Hi
Welcome to the Sonos Community!
I am sorry to hear of the multiple problems you are having with your Sonos system, and while I do not wish to trivialise them, I can assure you that the majority of our users do not see these issues.
In regard to the app UI, our CEO Tom Conrad is taking some constructive feedback from our users directly at the following thread, which I’d encourage you to take part in:
The rest of your concerns I think can be addressed with some troubleshooting - I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports. It sounds like there is likely some Wi-Fi interference negatively affecting your system. If you can capture some of this unwanted behaviour by submitting support diagnostics before you call in, it may expedite the process.
I hope this helps.
Hi Corry, Appreciate the response… I will acknowledge a fair bit of hyperbole in there, again: speakers sound awesome. An interrupted listening experience is frustrating. I'll try to summarize (and use less hyperbole... or more, I love hyperbole). Best, Joe
Sonos speakers sound wonderful. Their ecosystem is bad; there are multiple bad things about it, none of which have a single solution.
The "it's the WiFi guy" - they show up everywhere. 'Would that it 'twere that simple'. Yes, parts of it ARE the WiFi, but it's the obfuscated 2.4Ghz "SonosNet" Wifi that interferes with most household 2.4Ghz Wifi channels (often reserved for IoT). In my case, it's not the Wifi (I have the logs, excellent signal strengths, great AP density, etc.); points off for Sonos for coding their own little brand-named WiFi ecosystem that does not play nice with protocoled WiFi routers.
1. Changing the Wifi network (something I had to do in all the troubleshooting) is like a quest for Link from Zelda, where you have to travel from one further place of the map to the other further place on the map and then back again... hey, if you like that, if you are easily entertained, fine. But there is no way to universally change the Wifi for multiple speakers at once... you have to put each speaker in 'Sonos Cool Guy Program Mode', chase it down with the little audio blip, change the network, and start it back up. It's Byzantine minus the Minotaur. You know what you can do with every other system on earth? Change the Wifi once, minus the theatrics. At best, it's a series of unnecessary steps; easy to do better there.
2. The volume sliders are not synch per speaker, trying to sync them is an exercise in madness.
3. Every (non 'simple') user on earth: Hey I would like to listen to my TV, and then I would like to listen to my record player. Every other well-coded ecosystem on earth: no problem, we'll pick that up -or- at worst, you push a button. On Sonos it's like: "First decouple your 'Line-In' stereo pair... this super simple step will only take 15 minutes. Next, re-establish those newly decouple speakers now as part of the other speaker speaker thing and then once that it done you can now use your record player. You wanna switch back? Good Luck!
4. God-forbid you want to enlist your speakers tethered to the record player as stereo surrounds for the TV without dong the idiotic, unnecessary, and lengthy process that the genius coders at Sonos came up with (hence them being music haters, because in every other ecosystem it's [at most] a simple button press) because there will be a millisecond delay that gives you that baseball stadium sound coveted by audiophiles everywhere... wait, I mean nowhere.
5. Warbley stuttering with Era 100s over Wifi, complete dropping out of Era 100s over SonosNet; again, network is fine, even the units are reporting good signals (over Wifi where I can monitor tolerances...).
6. One knob exists on every audio system... it usually says something like: TV, Radio, Line-In, AUX... you can toggle between it, the system handles the rest.
The 2.4 gHz Sonosnet is only generated if you wire Ethernet to an older Sonos speaker, the newer ones avoid that mess. Even then you can disable tne radio in the wired speaker preventing Sonosnet creation. That does disable the 5 gHz Sonosnet needed for wireless home theater sets.
It has been requested many times and for years but Sonos hasn't offered an option to keep the radio active but disable the creation of the 2.4 gHz Sonosnet.
If you don't create the Sonosnet Wi-Fi is not an issue, I change both my 2.4 and 5 gHz channels fairly often and so far have never had to TouchType app or speakers. Sonosnet, not even going to tnink about it.
Volume sliders are a huge aggravation, except on the Grouping screen, there they seem reasonably useful.
#4 you might to research here a bit more, the reconfiguration issue is often discussed.
#5 Era 100s do not do Sonosnet, not sure what you are saying.
With respect to synchronizing the Volume setting of Grouped speakers, first drag the Group Volume to zero.
sorry Corry, but that’s BS. I’m sure it’s painful for people who work for Sonos, but it’s no less true: EVERYONE is tortured by Sonos. It sounds great, but it always screws up, and screws up in mysterious ways, at inopportune times. We all dropped coin and integrated pur systems around it … and it just makes life MISERABLE, because the system is wonky as hell and the user interface is the worst among any product I the world.
I really liked my system when I got it. As I added more I started noticing issues. Occasional drops, updates not happening at scheduled times, swearing that sound quality dropped after software update. I’ve done the full circuit on troubleshooting (diagnostic to Sonos. Full reset of network, putting everything on Ethernet, dedicated ip, trying web streaming and streaming from local library, etc) and have seen no change but it is infrequent enough to be hard to diagnose but frequent enough that it is very annoying. Not fed up enough to get rid or it but no longer adding or replacing with Sonos.
+19Hi
I completely understand your frustration, and I want to assure you that your feedback is heard and valid. Our CEO is already asking for UI feedback at the above-linked thread, and while it’s true that online forums often highlight users facing technical challenges, we rely on broad performance metrics to gauge the app's stability across our entire user base. These diagnostics currently show that, for the majority of users, the new app is performing more reliably than previous versions.
However, that data doesn't change the fact that your experience hasn't been seamless, and we want to help fix that. Every setup is unique, and what works for one person may not work for another.
To get your system back on track, I recommend that you start a dedicated thread detailing your specific setup and the errors you're seeing. This would allow our community to provide tailored troubleshooting steps to resolve these issues for you as quickly as possible - if things really are miserable for you, let’s do something about that!
My Sonos system never works reliably on WiFi and I have all the same problems. Even in a newly built house with no other WiFi in use, the tech tried to tell me it was interference. Corry, it’s painfully obvious that nobody at Sonos knows how to make WiFi stable (or a usable app). Telling people to “start a new thread” is insulting. Why should we do all the work? How about telling your CEO to stop marketing new products until he can fix the thousands of products that his update broke?
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