It’s an interesting perspective, but from my view point your description of the young doesn’t sound any different to my experience as a teenager.

Back then I wouldn’t leave the house without my Aiwa Walkman/Radio and headphones. When I moved out of home to the opposite end of the country, I was sharing a house and while I went to Richer Sounds to get an integrated amp + speakers, one of my housemates just used a clock radio and the other had headphones permanently in his ears.

My working life from ~2004 onwards I’ve always been environments with a mixture of people wearing headphone and not. Back then it was a mix of Archos, Cowen, Creative and iPods in use until Spotify appeared and some found the music they liked could just be streamed instead.

My own son isn’t really any different to I was. He takes his phone and streams instead of a Walkman when he leaves the house, but otherwise it’s no different. In the house I think there have been 2 main influences. A mix of both age/interest, he and his friends play games and build virtual worlds online so use headphones for chatting and playing online. Additionally in recent years the pandemic lockdowns, meant an increase in headphone usage for everyone in the house due to online lessons, confidential work conversations and wanting to block out other general background noise.

My personal aversion to unnecessary cloud dependency comes from most of my working life being on the other side of the curtain. Most of it has been spent designing, building and supporting large scale online platforms. The majority of companies either operated in highly regulated environments and/or with sensitive data, so questioning do we actually need this data or dependency has been a significant question throughout my working life. The companies had no problem refusing to collect or create unnecessary dependencies regardless of the size of the client requesting as we would be on the hook for any issues, fines or worse, not the client requesting it.

I don’t think the headphone demographic is what scares Sonos, if it did the USP of the Ace wouldn’t require an expensive soundbar and they wouldn’t be so expensive. Sonos used to be in a unique position, their products sat above the cheap mass market mini music systems and boom boxes, but below the HiFi separates market in quality with the premium providing a just works product for local playback and the emerging streaming market.

Now they are the in the difficult position where they are losing their USP. The traditional split of audio companies, video companies and IT companies has gone.

On the one hand, Amazon and Apple are both content providers and with the surprising success of the cheap voice assistant speakers are now taking a segment of the audio and video market seriously. Google will continue to be as random as ever but own the 5th largest audio streaming service globally.

Advances in microchips and audio chips provide a low cost of entry into device manufacture with devices that are good enough for the mass market. Companies who previously had little interest in audio or were unknown outside their home market, such as Samsung, HiSense amongst others are expanding into everything and often have pockets deep enough to buy companies rather than need to start from nothing and develop everything themselves.

The way music is accessed and the devices used for playback have changed and been embraced by the mass market. I suspect far faster than many companies expected and for those caught unawares, new upstarts and far larger companies saw and moved on opportunities.

This works a treat, thanks

i jumped turn phone landscape at first 

Sonos could maybe suggest this to help users diagnose

Thank you for sharing Andy’s summary analysis. I wrote the Sonos CEO yesterday. I’m pasting his response here:

Sonos Support
Fri, Jul 19, 8:00 PM (16 hours ago)
to me

Hello and thank you for taking the time to reach out to me.

I’ve received a great deal of feedback regarding our new app, on both the improvements made, as well as where we fell short. If you are among those for whom the experience is falling short, I want you to know that I hear you. Teams across Sonos are working diligently to address customer concerns as quickly as possible. 

Since launch, we have reintroduced a number of features via updates, including the ability to add and edit alarms, sleep timer settings, add songs to the queue and play next, as well as initial screen reader improvements for iOS VoiceOver that will allow users to more easily navigate the app. We continue to roll out updates regularly, so please ensure your Sonos App and products are all up to date: https://support.sonos.com/article/update-your-sonos-speakers 

Over the coming weeks, we will reintroduce local music library search and playback, as well as Update Wi-Fi settings, at the same time that we continue to address bugs and performance issues.

In the meantime, if you are experiencing an issue with your Sonos System, you may find the following resources helpful, and are always welcome to reach out to our support team directly.

Sonos Community

Sonos App User Guide

Sonos Support Home

Sonos Support Contact

Thank you again for being a Sonos customer, and for taking the time to reach out to us to share your feedback. I, and the full team at Sonos are committed to delivering on a Sonos experience that brings the joy of unparalleled sound into your lives every day. Delivering on our promise of an easier, faster and better app experience is fundamental to this aim, and you have my personal word that nothing is more important to us at this time.

Sincerely,

Patrick Spence

https://en.community.sonos.com/ask-a-question-228987/interesting-read-on-how-sonos-is-changing-6899414?postid=16768407#post16768407

That's standard spiel auto response, seem it many times unfortunately

I do believe support staff are working tirelessly, they have to learn new app faults as well from feedback

Yup, boiler plate canned response. 

So does the new use of mDNS which would effectively appear to be labelled as Bonjour on lots of network kit, mean that as well as all the detailed steps to get STP config right on managed switches, you now (ideally) need a switch that supports mDNS/Bonjour, and that these settings are correctly configured to allow the packets to get where they need to? 

I do have a little sympathy with Sonos here (less with the new app) as there are too many devices ‘trying’ to make this stuff invisible that then trip over each other. For example, Sky Q devices attempt to create a mesh WiFi whether you want it or not, and as such advertise STP bridge IDs below those used by Sonos… If you want to get control of your network back then you need a ‘proper’ managed switch, which now it seems needs to hande mDNS too… I say proper as some of the cheaper managed switches have very limited options. 

Is this level of complication the only way to get the ‘Sonos sync’ to function or could it be done over a vanilla network without using STP etc? 

No, not at all. multicast DNS (mDNS) operates within the multicast IP range on 224.0.0.251/ff02::fb port 5353.

It has no requirement for a managed switch, but if you are using one with igmp enabled, that should cover it. As it is designed for local-link network, if you use vlans and want to cross the vlan boundary then you will need a reflector/repeater rather than using an igmp proxy.

A badly configured mDNS client can have some unexpected behaviour and both Linux distribution maintains and the System-D development team have been caught out in the past.

for example, mDNS has the .local domain reserved for it’s use and no requirement for a dns server on the network. an mDNS client should ignore any unicast response from a standard DNS server on the LAN claiming to be authoritative for the .local domain and only use responses for the .local domain from the multicast IP address.

If you don’t ignore the .local response from the LAN DNS server then odd things can occur with discovery.

The Sonos STP can of worms is completely unrelated to mDNS and really shouldn’t still be a thing. As far as I’m aware they haven’t updated to RSTP, so in managed switches where you can’t disable STP on the ports Sonos is attached to, you have no option but to configure it for Sonos settings. On my own switches pretty much ignored the Sonos STP, left STP disabled in my switches and enabled RSTP. Sonos did it’s thing, while all my other devices did theirs without any issues. 

So @sigh you clearly know a lot more about mDNS than I (as I admitted in my article), so do you think the discovery problems are caused by crappy router implementations, or a crappy implementation in the Sonos app? (Or both??). Or even a crappy implementation in another device on the network??

This was a great technical explanation of how @SONOS works, that a layperson could follow. Thanks for posting @sigh!

I’m going to try the Sonophone app. I don’t like the newS2 UI, especially for using music apps. You have to scroll several pages to get back to TV or other things, and SonosRadio and TuneIn still don’t work in newS2, lol.

Sonos Radio and the TuneIn app work in SonoPhone. Sheesh, SonoPhone ($3.99) hooked up immediately, I didn’t have to log in or anything. No deep controls or eq, that I can see. The newS2 also updates and saves my SonoPhone activity, at least some of it, upon cursory use, in newS2!

Great suggestion @106rallye!!!!

I don’t like the word crappy, I prefer misconfigured 

mDNS should work fine on a simple modern consumer network. Its used in many consumer devices, such as printers, cameras, AirPlay, etc. When it can get messy is when ‘prosumer’ or ‘enterprise’ network devices are used in a consumer network environment, and have not been configured correctly by the installer. @sigh  makes a good point .local was a Microsoft? default for local DNS TLD about 20 years ago, if this is still used in a consumer network, it could potentially cause issues.

Sonos could (have?) code their software to use alternative method for discovery if mDNS is not discovering as expected. The speakers could (in theory) ‘phone home’ with discovery details, and the App could get the details from a remote service, and cache them locally?

If someone had no discovery issues with the old app, but is having them with the new app, my gut feeling is that it is in the app side, but not necessarily that mDNS is failing.

How and where the app is handling the overarching discovery process and dealing with responses from the local mDNS discovery and the api.ws.sonos.com request could be what is causing issues, rather than the local mDNS.

The old app had 2 different behaviours depending whether you were logged into your Sonos account. Opening the app from closed to the System page

When not logged in to the sonos account in the app:

• it performs local discovery and shows the Sonos devices that respond

When starting the app and logged into your sonos account 3 things happen in parallel:

• it performs local discovery
• it requests a device list from the sonos cloud api (presumably similar to the method in the dev docs for controllers)
• it shows grey boxes on the system page until both the above complete/fail and then shows the devices it has responses for

The responsiveness and what devices are shown with the logged in behaviour of the old app can be influenced by external issues when attempting to connect to the Sonos api during device discovery.

Blocking *.sonos.com with a pi-hole or similar, then the discovery behaves similar to not being logged is just slightly slower because the pi-hole returns a NULL response to the api dns request which causes the app to give up the connection attempt and show the list of devices which responded locally.

A slow request to the Sonos api, which could be anything from slow dns responses, overloaded internet connection, overloaded sonos servers, random other event somewhere on the internet, causes the app to keep showing grey placeholders until a timeout out is hit.
When the timeout is hit it flashes an issue finding devices notification, then immediately displays all the locally found devices only. When the request eventually completes, or retries later, additional devices registered against the sonos household but not found through local discovery get added to the list.

I simulated the above by overloading my pi-hole before starting the app. When the api call had reached a timeout (~10 sec I think) during discovery, it flashed an error notification, showed my 4 locally switched on speakers. When the pi-hole recovered before the usual default 30 second dns timeout a call completed and 3 speakers which have been unplugged for about a month, but still registered with my account, showed up as unavailable.

Where it becomes tricky to identify what might actually be causing it, is that things have moved around in the new app. eg login in is now a requirement, the app doesn’t auto switch households based on local discovery, the new local search currently happens in a process which requires working internet (to be separated in a future update)

While the discovery process may be similar, eg perform local discovery and call the api in parallel, it is likely wrapped in a different overarching app flow.
How that reacts if there is an issue, such as the online call times out and/or has no response does it show nothing? What happens if there is a mismatch between locally discovered but registered devices and devices registered against the login account?

Ideally the behaviour would be the same as the old app, but given the changes in making things like login mandatory, other things like the recently added Local Library search currently only work with an internet connection (to be fixed in the future) it wouldn’t be a surprise to find device discovery and display of devices has ended up shackled to online requests which don’t react well to unexpected behaviour.

Something I found interesting about Airplay and the Apple TV is while it is still using bonjour as the primary discovery method, Apple have supplemented the bonjour discovery with Bluetooth LE discovery which sends out the Apple TV lan IP address. Over the many years they’ve been doing Airplay, maybe they found that adding the additional bluetooth discovery mechanism helped avoid issues in complex network setups, eg offices, and reduce home user issues due to random equipment either supplied by an ISP or it was the cheapest/store/online recommended item.

I had issues with Sonos pre new app release. I spent a bit of time looking at mDNS on my network (BT mesh WiFi) and concluded that there was a rate limit of broadcast (multicast and broadcast are treated the same on a WiFi network) traffic that could be triggered if there was enough of it. 
Broadcasts on WiFi network are sent at the lowest possible speed/max error correction to maximise the probability of all attached devices receiving the traffic as there’s no reliable method for ensuring delivery. As SSDP and mDNS/bonjour protocols use multicast (and will likely be treated as broadcast on most home routers) and as you add more and more smart devices the likelihood of this happening increase. 
My local network performance in terms of user experience of Sonos/homekit devices became worse and worse, even though my internet connectivity was stable, so I swapped out the BT mesh WiFi for an eero’s mesh and everything just started working. I’ve seen a few firmware updates on eero related to multicast and ssdp improvements so my guess is that there’s protocol inspection occurring that increases the broadcast limits for these traffic types. 
I’ve not personally had any issues with Sonos device discovery since the new app/firmware but I have experienced odd behaviours with grouping and loss of playback control using the Sonos controller. I’ve not had any issues using airplay. 
From the analysis done on this post it appears there has been a massive increase in broadcast traffic from Sonos so maybe the issues are twofold. 
One, the app stability, two, a step change in the number of customers triggering broadcast limits. 

I took the plunge today so I could perform some semblance of local Sonos control with my iPhone. The app’s UI is very dated and always seems to show one speaker at a time. It seems to work well for playing music (local and streaming). But as you ask, there don’t seem to be any Sonos management functions for Sonos in the app--notably alarms. Someone please correct me if these features exist.

Only the SONOS built controllers can configure the system. 3rd party controllers can only play music. Check the SonoPhone documentation because there are some options that popup if you touch longer.

Drag up the now playing area at the bottom of the screen to see all your speakers. Or tap the name of your system, top left on the Home Screen - that does the same thing.

Simply tap the speaker you want to play on, select the music, and away you go.

Also: Settings - Manage. That’s where you’ll find all the management functions, including alarms.

@Rhonny We are not talking about the Sonos app.

Apologies. Misread!