Purchased Sonos One's as surrounds to add Airplay - now I am told I can't

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I had a surround setup with a Playbar, a subwoofer, and two Sonos Play:1. I purchased two Sonos One's about 1 month ago to replace the Play:1's so that I would be able to get Airplay support. Now I am told that in this confuguration the Sonos One's will not support Airplay. Pretty lame of Sonos not to have been clear about this ahead of time!

Will a future software update remediate this?

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inopinatusAnswer

Prominent Collaborator I

Sadly, it's the difference between "you can group them and it brings Airplay to your your entire Sonos system!" (which is what they said e.g. at https://blog.sonos.com/en-au/airplay2-coming/) and "you can bond them and it'll make your Playbar an Airplay 2 target!" (which is what we all wanted to hear).

It was pretty weaselly worded if you ask me, since the difference between grouping and bonding is a technical nuance specific to Sonos's proprietary system so I am not surprised at your disappointment. It's not reasonable to presume that people outside of the Sonos echo chamber would know the difference.

There were some clarifications buried in the forum for those that could find them e.g. https://en.community.sonos.com/home-theater-228993/playbar-vs-playbase-in-an-airplay-2-compatible-home-theatre-setup-6799021/index1.html#post16240175 but again hardly reasonable to expect a regular consumer to dig that deep.

To your specific question, they have not indicated publicly that a future update will supply this behavior.

uncooked meat prior to state vector collapse

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miguelitoAuthor

Trending Lyricist I

That's not what is happening. Alexa is telling the Sonos to play in the room name of the One. The room master is the Playbar, so the Playbar gets the commands from Alexa and plays the requested stream, sending the derived single channels to each One. You can't get around the fact that the only device capable of sending a separate channel to each One for it to play is the Playbar. There is no way for the One to both decode the Airplay 2 DRM and play the single channel it is being sent by the Playbar.

Ok understood.

Does this mean that the Alexa implementation on Sonos is limited to what Sonos can do rather than what Alexa can do? For example, if I want to play from a service that is supported by Alexa Echo speakers but not Sonos, it would not work in the Sonos implementation of Alexa?

jgatie

Ok understood.

Does this mean that the Alexa implementation on Sonos is limited to what Sonos can do rather than what Alexa can do? For example, if I want to play from a service that is supported by Alexa Echo speakers but not Sonos, it would not work in the Sonos implementation of Alexa?

There are definitely some features supported by Echo that are not supported by the Sonos Alexa devices. Not music services, because all Alexa supported services are supported on Sonos, but things like Drop In and Calling are only available on Echo devices.

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miguelitoAuthor

Trending Lyricist I

There are definitely some features supported by Echo that are not supported by the Sonos Alexa devices. Not music services, because all Alexa supported services are supported on Sonos, but things like Drop In and Calling are only available on Echo devices.

Ok understood. Probably why Sonos does not understand "Play NPR" and requries "Play NPR from TuneIn" while Echo understands it without any issues.

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