In the first of many Community hosted events, we are happy to announce a Technical Q&A with Coen Westerveld, Principal Product Manager. Coen is a long-time veteran at Sonos joining back in 2013. Recently, he helped to bring Move 2 to life and will be able to answer questions pulled directly from this thread, as well as the thread on the Sonos subreddit. We will close for questions in about a week (5th of November).
Need some inspiration for what questions to ask? Maybe a question or two comes to mind after reading our Essential Guide to Move 2. Or after reading the product page for the Move 2, you feel there is something else that you would love to know more about.
So what’s on your mind? Have any questions for Coen about Move 2? Drop them down below! We’ll compile all the questions and share them back here.
PS, we also got a video showing how the Move 2 is made 👀
EDIT:
After a lot of work from Coen and his team, we got answers to your questions.
Coen and his team could not answer them all, ss there were a few questions unrelated to the Move 2 . But not to worry, Keith and I, together with the product and software teams, have found answers for you to those questions as well!
We know some of you might want to avoid reading through both Reddit and the Community posts, so I cleaned up the questions and paraphrased them to ensure you got the gist of what the question was.
If you want the full context of the question, head down into the comment section of the Reddit and the Community post and scroll until you find my post. It will contain the complete question with context, together with the answers to the questions.
Thank you everyone for participating with your great questions and feedback!
When will a Sonos AV Amp or a Sonos AV port come out?
We don't comment on the details of our product roadmap or timeline. You can visit our newsroom on sonos.com for the latest announcements and more. But we do love hearing about what people want to be “the next thing” from Sonos, and document all of these feature requests, for the product team.
Era 100 does not support SonosNet generated by Boost : does Era 100 work with a wired connection?
Yes, you are able to wire the Era 100/300, with the usb-c Ethernet dongle. It won’t produce SonosNet, but will accept the wired connection.
A thing to note is, when Ethernet is detected, the Era will turn off the Wi-Fi interface in the unit. Bluetooth will of course still continue to work.
We highly recommend using our own dongle which is designed in house, to ensure you won’t have any issues with the wired connection. Some third party dongles can work, however they need to be using the same chipset we are using for our dongle. Otherwise you won’t be able to get a connection or the player may misbehave.
A feature where you could “Lock” the trueplay tuning of the Move would be great. What is the reason that is not possible to do on a high end product like that, which regularly will be sitting in the same place for a long time?
Great question! The Move was designed to be taken with you around the house, hence always needed to be tuning itself to adapt to the environment. But for people who have their Move be more stationary it does make sense to be able to lock it. I personally like the suggestion and will take the request into consideration.
I’d love to know more about the automatic trueplay tuning- any juicy info on how it works?
Automatic Trueplay uses internal microphones that measure the frequency response from the music in response to the speaker’s surroundings. Using software, Move 2 adjusts its EQ for perfectly balanced sound specific to its position. Move 2 also knows when not to tune: when in motion, when there is too much noise, or when the microphone signals are not good enough.
If you want to know more on trueplay and how it works, Tim Sheen wrote a blog post about how Trueplay works.
How much movement is needed before it re-tunes?
Auto-trueplay actually continuously adapts while the product is sitting still but resets and shuts down while the product is in motion.
A little cool fact about the tuning. It was originally an internal pitch, as someone had done it as a side project. Everyone loved it so much it got implemented into the feature we know and love.
How long does the re-tuning process take?
When you’ve enabled automatic Trueplay, the tuning happens about every 60 seconds.
You can test this for yourself by flipping the Move upside down and placing it on its head. You will be able to hear how fast the tuning happens… and as a result will get some horrible sounding music.
If you flip it back you can hear how fast it re-tunes and sounds great again. The speaker does need to “listen” for a short while, before it returns to the sound you know and love.
Why was the Move 2 not named Era Move? as it has the same design language and jump in audio performance (going from Mono to Stereo).
Move 2 was a generational update, so we are keeping our existing generational update naming conventions. (Era 100/300 were brand new products to the portfolio).
How are product names processed within the company?
When naming a new product there are many considerations at play and it is a very cross functional effort. To support this, we have a robust process in place.
How do you create stereo from one speaker?
We use two tweeters to build a sense of stereo or "spaciousness" out of one speaker.
This does not produce the same sort of stereo image that would be produced by two separate speakers spaced apart from each other but it does produce a more realistic and detailed soundscape than Move gen 1 or other mono speakers.
Do we get quadraphonic sound or is one of the drivers disabled when the Move 2 is in a stereo pair?
Both tweeters are still in use, they do, however then both play the right or left side of the stereo signal, instead of playing both. This will create a more immersive stereo sound and more detailed channel separation.
Why can’t you stereopair the Move 2 yet when it is Bluetooth-mode?
The current Bluetooth experience on Move 2 allows for audio to play from a single speaker that the control device is connected to, with grouping to other Sonos speakers available via WiFi. We’ll continue to evolve with customer needs and bring new features over time.
Why are the streams pegged at 24bit/48kHz max when the speaker internals are I’m sure capable of decoding at higher rates ?
As this is a broader question, I (Mike) will jump in on this one.
The speakers would theoretically be able to handle higher bitrates, especially with the new components running 5ghz WiFi. But things like Atmos music taking up to 18,000 kbps would put a considerable strain on the home network if you were to have something higher bitrate than this and wanted all the speakers in your house/apartment to play simultaneously.
But when it comes to the adjustment of the quality of music, that is a feature some of the music services we support use.
So, if you are experiencing dropouts, the data stream will automatically be downgraded until it gets stable.
We do add higher bitrates as Music Service providers implement it, but we always need to do proper testing for each, to ensure that the experience is on par with what everyone expects of Sonos.
And as Steven says in his blog on the subject:
“Your options for listening to hi-res audio will continue to evolve. And so will we. We are constantly evaluating the state of audio and updating our products so that you can be sure you’re getting the best quality audio experience with the simplicity, ease, and reliability you expect from Sonos. We’ll continue to update this post with new information, including when we introduce new hi-res offerings from other streaming partners.”
How does a stereo setup of 2 Move 2 work when both speakers have Trueplay set to On?
I have noticed that my Move2 suddenly adjusts the sound just because an old Chuck Berry song is being played in a radio program with new popular music, this is also quite annoying.
That does seem odd, as they will adjust compared to what is playing to make sure the song sounds its “best” no matter where the speakers are placed. So it would most likely be a bug from the sound of things. Knowing which song you can reproduce this with would be great, so we can investigate what might be causing it.
I have a Sony PS-LX310BT Bluetooth-enabled turntable. It works well when paired and connected to the Roam and Move 1. But when I pair it with the Move 2, no audio plays out of the speaker.
We are currently investigating this issue, but we do not currently have an ETA for it. For those of you experiencing this issue, please reach out to our support team.
