To the first - of course. I merely spoke of the Echo solution because I know it best of the alternatives discussed here.

To the second, why does there have to be one product/make that does it all? Indeed, is it not risky to have all eggs in one basket?

Having reread, indeed that is an oxymoron and not what I meant as I wrote it. Minimal lock-in…one product  One compatible standard it’s more what I meant.

I’d much prefer to pick and choose any brand that has a device which suits where I want to use it, with a common control interface and sources interface, not needing to worry about will it work with X or Y. The utopia upnp/dlna failed to deliver. I think it will mostly arrive eventually, but for now it’s still just a juggling act of what works best together with minimal extra glue services when mixing and matching different owner brands. 

almazri:

 I’m hanging on to the Sonos stuff.  The WiiM is connected to KEF LS50 WII speakers along with a Sonos Port also connected to KEF.  Both digital out.

 What I like about WiiM is the response to feature requests.  When the Ultra was released there was no option to turn off the display.  I, and probably others, requested a feature to be able to do so.  Next update it was done.

 That and the Echo compatibility sold me.

Library + Qobuz + RP + SomaFM →

Roon

→ Sonos (as renderers)

→ WiiM

→ Apple tablets, Android phones

Yeah I’m hanging on to my Sonos stuff as well. The hardware is still good and third party front ends make it way better. Big WiiM fan, also looking at Audirvana and Roon.

 I think I missed the objective of this topic.  I have no intent to replace my Sonos speakers with something else.  For Atmos playback the Arc-Sub3-300s sounds great.  The Move stereo pair is perfect for listening on the deck.  The Port digitally connected to the KEF LS50 WII speakers gives me excellent sound from a system with the largest number of services available.  
 
 The purpose of the Echo / WiiM grouping is whole house music where it’s likely sound quality is not necessarily the number one goal.  Not that it doesn’t sound good but usually it’s during a party where serious listening ain’t possible.  To do whole house with Sonos was going to cost me more than I want to spend where SQ is not a big concern.

 When we eat dinner a pair of Echo Gen 4 are shuffling a Jazz playlist I created on Spotify.  Sounds better than your average restaurant.

What does compatibility mean? Can both be grouped together to play in sync, and if so via what app?

A problem I will face when even one of my downstream Sonos units dies, is that replacing that with one from another make will mean that all zones won’t sync as they do today when driven by line in wired Echos - the Sonos 70 millisecond delay is uniform enough across all Sonos units to permit in sync play. Will cross that bridge when it comes.

 I use the Alexa app to group the Echo speakers with the WiiM devices.  The top three are WiiM.

Nice! Does the group survive power cycling of any or all units? And presumably, all units in the group will play in perfect sync, which would mean that none need to resort to the delay that Sonos needs, to achieve such sync?

They play in sync.  Even the one connected to the DAC in the KEF speakers is in sync.  Never had a technical reason to power cycle any, except during a storm I unplug the speakers.  Never lost the group doing that.

One more data point that suggests the obsolete state of core Sonos tech today. Not a surprise, because that horse has been flogged for two decades, in a rapidly evolving domain.

Also a reason for all the Spence thrashing around - there has to be a reason for the madness. The problem was with the execution of his solution to the strategic dilemma Sonos has been facing for some years now. Only when the execution is sorted out can one decide if at least the solution was sound.

Thank you. I hadn’t realized a cross-product solution like yours could play in sync.  Perhaps I should invest in more Wiims.  Sounds like a good hedge against Sonos ceasing to be a going concern.

Another check to run is to see if the speakers - or speaker groups - can be seen as target speakers on an app like Spotify such that by choosing the target, music playing on the phone app can be made to start playing on the target, taking the phone out of the music play loop. 

Once that is the case, the app by the speaker maker becomes largely irrelevant. It is then just needed for initial set up or for set up changes.

In my experience, having been a die hard high end audio guy for many years, many folks don’t realize how good they have it with the current Sonos product line capabilities!

Sure, there have been problems along the way. The new app has many folks upset, including my good pal who got me into Sonos a few years ago and owns 12 of their speakers. Lost his play list and has had some drop outs.  

Me? I lost Amazon Music for “one day”. That was it!

The thing is, a carefully thought out Sonos set up is actually amazing. From my old hi-fi days, there were continuous issues as time went by. Heat, cables, multiple manufactures to deal with and if something went wrong, have fun shipping a nice/heavy amp out! Then, there was figuring out what component had the issue.

Just my opinion but, Sonos seems to really care! Maybe I’ll get flamed here. These are fabulous products. They ‘work”. The work for a long time too!

I go to Princeton NJ often with my family. I used to collect LP’s at the Princeton record Exchange.

Now I just hit a button and can get almost anything i want in a moment’s notice.

Btw, there is a consignment store in Princeton, that has had a set of original Play 1 speakers going since day one…..Playing 6 days a week, for about 10 hours a day.

The speakers still “work” great and sound darn good. 

Appreciate the tech available from companies like this. 

Just my two cents. -:)

As I was recently out and about, discussing audio in general terms, I met a fellow who volunteered that he likes the new SONOS controller.

It is notable that the pro Sonos voices are now quoted/reluctant outliers.

There still is nothing to fault with Sonos audio hardware for the most part. It is the software side where Sonos has suffered from an overreach by Spence and co., with Spence no doubt carrying over his experience from his time at Blackberry when it crashed and burned while he was on the bridge. No doubt he saw Sonos trapped in a similar box canyon, and this mess is his response to that state of affairs.

It is also notable that a Sonos that has filed many patent violations suits has not filed a single one against Amazon, which suggests that Echo have been able to do all that Sonos does in a way very different from what Sonos does. I don’t think any suits have been filed against Wiim either. They may just be using more advance tech than what Sonos does, ways for which Sonos can’t take them to court.

Interesting times for Sonos/Sonos users. A buyer may be a salvation but the longer it takes for one to appear, the less there may be left to buy, even at 5 bucks a share; Sonos hardware, while good, is no longer unique in being so. The existing user base may well be the only asset to sell, which is good news for it.

Reddit, that Spence believes in more than he seems to believe in this place to reach out to those that pay him his salary, had this to say about the app 3 months ago, that I haven’t seen refuted anywhere since then:

At its core, their mess is an app that now relies on a round trip via the cloud just to change the volume.

That’s a fundamental architecture decision, and not something they can just ‘fix’ with a dot release.

Another issue flowing from their total focus on the cloud is the terrible local library support. Yes, they’re working on adding better support back in, but Sonos will still be a cloud-first platform.

So long as the app is a glorified wrapper for a web-based experience then we’re not going to see a return to the more stable (albeit somewhat clunky) app we had before.

This from a Sonos that correctly decided to not offer Alexa integration in 2017 to Indian users because it did not see the business case in making the local server infra investments that Amazon has made, to offer a latency free voice control user experience in India via the Alexa integration. The same Sonos is now going to rely on the cloud doing the job without still itself having the scale to afford investments needed for the app to work globally in a slick way?

I think the Google appeal and Sonos getting told off by the judge for abusing the patent system might have a bit to with it. Whereas Sound United and Lenbrook came to an out of court settlement in earlier years, Google had deep enough pockets to fight back.

Google also had no concerns about removing the Google integration and could easily remove YouTube, which hurts Sonos more than Google. Similarly for Amazon, Sonos have more to lose than Amazon if Amazon shrug their shoulder and remove Alexa compatibility and Amazon Music.

What’s more notable is they have never gone after Yamaha or any of the other companies providing similar before Sonos got to market, because Sonos, like everyone else back in the beginning was taking each others products apart to see how they worked. Yamaha MusicCast was release in 2003 with multi room CD quality streaming.

Sonos are more Apple like than people think. They didn’t invent or lead innovation in the market, they mostly packaged existing technology differently in a way that sold.

The recently announced Unifi Play PowerAmp (https://ui.com/new-integrations/premium-audio) must be a Sonos, Ubiquity collaboration because it is Amp sized and Amp feature spec’d with minor changes for the commercial.  If It wasn’t I’d have expected Ubiquity to have been hit with a suit by now and that would be one I’d expect Sonos could easily win. More interestingly for Unifi owners is likely the new ‘Unifi Play’ profile type for the network gear.

I don’t know enough about all the court stories.

As to Apple, the great irony is that many Sonos apologists here are Apple haters, for Apple being the walled garden that it is.

I see nothing wrong in walled gardens per se as long as they work for a reasonable premium. As does my Mac/s since 2008, and now, the new iPhone that I reluctantly took as a gift from my son.

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

There is a lot to be said for investing in a high quality speaker that is fed from a cheaper "disposable" font end.

My music now is mainly started from Spotify App or Alexa.

I am still on S1, but barely use the app at all now, just for local music (NAS).

Spotify can group multiple rooms together.

I think over the past six months Sonos have made their own Noose and hanged themselves with it chasing profits.

Investing in thousands of pounds worth of speakers and then realising you don't really own them has started to sink in for the majority of people now, you are at the mercy of what Sonos deem appropriate software wise for your system even if it makes it completely unusable..

I’d like to know where I can buy a competitive/quality product like my full range Sonos set up, for anywhere near the cost.

I’m not as down on this company as many seem to be.

Btw, my bad…..The Princeton consignment store I mentioned has a pair of the original Play 5’s...Not the play 1’s.

Going daily. …..Just sayin’.

I am in exactly the same happy place, since before S1/S2 forked and I realised that S2 was just a rip off and to get me to dump Sonos hardware that was then and still is in perfect working condition.

Would you buy a high end TV today if it did not offer an option to use FireCube or Apple TV and had to only run the TV using bundled smarts by even someone as reputed as Sony or Samsung, if someone else like a Panasonic gave you that option? The TV makers have long since realised to not invest development dollars in their versions of smart UI, and let users decide for the most part between Amazon and Apple for the smart UI to the TV.

Why would you even need to know if Sonos ticks all your boxes today? When it all works, Sonos is still good enough for most home use cases.

But if it does not, this thread and a few others here by now, answer your questions, if you are ok with a solution that is not dumbed down. 

As many Sonos users have now realised, there is a price to be paid for dumbed down solutions. 

 Bluesound is an option.  Their system also does share indexing like Sonos.  I don’t know if Bluesound is also no longer using SMBv1.  I have a Bluesound Pulse that shares the library in my Bryston BDP-2.  I’ve had it set up that way for many years now.  Don’t know the com protocol used for that share.  What disappoints me about Bluesound is share discovery was removed or at least at this time it does not work here.  What was cool about share discovery was when you chose Add Shares the BluOS app would display all shares it could find on your network.  Then you just pick the ones you want and they get indexed.  Very user friendly.  Now it seems to be missing.  Lesson is all systems make changes that may not make all people happy.

Exactly and which is why the solution arrived at by @Keithmac and I via different paths. If I was to choose Wiim today, I would take the Wiim mini and wire connect that to a HiFi system of active speakers via line in jacks. Insulating them from any future WiiM changes. But in my case Echo does it for less, and with the Show devices, also offers a display that is excellent for album art for the music playing.