I upgraded my Arc to an Arc Ultra over the weekend and I have a couple thoughts on how this process could possibly be improved.

1 - Allow quick setup for soundbar replacement  - I would guess that it’s fairly common for a consumer to upgrade their soundbar while keeping the same sub and surround speakers.  In this scenario, it would much appreciated if you could simply run a copy wizard to bring over all the setting from the previous theatre room (room name, TV setup, voice assistant, etc) as well as automatically recreate the dedicated connection to sub(s)  and surround speakers.  Since the room audio dynamics isn’t changing either, bring over the trueplay settings too.  That’s assuming that trueplay, doesn’t depend on speakers involved but on room acoustics alone (or the room accoustics aspect could be saved separately so that you don’t have to wave your phone around again, the calculations are just redone).

To clarify, I have no idea how often setups are soundbar replacement only, and I have no idea what sort of dev effort this would take.  It’s a suggestion only.

2 - Pre-bond speakers in sets - When purchasing a home theatre set, it would be ideal if the speakers were already bonded when you receive them.  That would cut down on setup time greatly.  I seriously doubt this is possible though as I don’t think Sonos keeps inventory by sets to enable this, nor do I think they have the capability to add any specific programming to speakers in the warehouse.

3- Preload setup options during shipping - Assuming that Sonos identifies product serial numbers that it ships out, they could allow users to log into the website and begin answering setup questions through the Sonos website immediately after shipping.  Consumers could specify what room the speaker will belong to and what speakers it will be bonded/paired to.  They can specify voice control they want to use, and other settings, all the things they would have to do when the speaker arrives.  When the speaker does arrive, the setup would just be a matter of placing speakers, plugging in, and then press above to run a script of the options already chosen.  Uses would only need to provide wifi password (if 1st Sonos speaker), service acct passwords, and trueplay tuning.

Again, just suggestions.  I’m not making comments on how easy these changes would be or guesses as to how many consumers would benefit.