Sonos wireless headphones (or earbuds)

  • 16 February 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 13438 views

This is a question for the Sonos owners and designers. Excellent concept, the products are splendid, but why are there no options for Sonos wireless headphones? There must be millions of customers waiting for this product. Listeners who want to be mobile around the house, office or workshop without having all the speakers on in all the rooms. Listeners in a quiet space, or in bed. The hard of hearing - sometimes we need the telly on louder than the everyone else or do not want to annoy the neighbours. Come on Sonos, what's the holdup :D
Please let us all know if we can look forward to wireless Sonos Headphones.
Kindest regards,
Kevin.

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3 replies

If you look at the multiple other threads asking this question, you'll see that there's not enough space in a normal headphone / earbud to support all of the intelligence/system that is in the speakers. Well, I suppose you might be able to cram in an over the ear earphone all of the electronics, but that would take away from their desire to be a speaker company, and wake up the silent home. They make all of their money selling speakers which provide outstanding connectivity, why would they want to undercut those sales by making a single person device?

Remember, each speaker is effectively it's own computer and wifi router, crammed in with a power supply and a pretty darn good speaker. All of the "intelligence", or at least 90% of it, resides inside the speaker and not in the application. The application, where ever you happen to be running it, is merely a remote control, and once you've initiated a process of any type on the speaker, no longer needs to be connected. Think of it the same way you think of your remote for your TV....none of the actual data being played by your TV goes through the remote.

Would it be possible for them to do a headphone? I suppose so, but it would be a pretty serious deviation from their current "mesh network" system, since the amount of power necessary to support that would be hard to cram into a headset. So I'd give it a 98% chance of not happening anytime soon.

However, since they don't share their product roadmap with us, generally speaking (and a good idea that tends to be!), I could be wrong, and they'll announce that it will be in stores on Tuesday. But I will not be holding my breath.

Besides, there are a lot of threads in which other members have suggested alternate ways of connecting some pretty darn good headphones to the Sonos ecosystem.
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I'm telling you... the more posts that come, my idea of a "connect:mini" is looking better and better 😉

(no... not really trying raise that again... )

I suppose a set of headphones that connect to a base system that could handle the requirements Bruce mentions above could work... then perhaps multiple versions of headphones (full, buds, etc) but I can't really see the demand be such that it would be viable...

Oh wait... a base unit that has bluetooth built in so the Sonos device feeds any bluetooth headphones.... 😛 (ok... I agree... there is something inherently warped about that idea... maybe I need a drink.)
I am using Sennheiser TR180 Wireless Headphones with my SONOS System. All you need is a SONOS CONNECT. Set it up as a separate Room, plug the headphone transmitter into the Audio Output of the CONNECT, choose your music source and that's all you need. Admittedly the cost of a CONNECT+ the Headphones makes it a fairly expensive setup.

You can achieve the same result by plugging in a Bluetooth Transmitter into the CONNECT, but you'll not get the same sound quality and range as with a good set of wireless headphones.

With the Sennheiser Headphone transmitter the range is pretty good; much better than Bluetooth.