SONOS MOVE BLUETOOTH STEREO PAIRING IS IMPOSSIBLE


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FYI, You cant stereo pair MOVE speakers while on Bluetooth. DO NOT WASTE TIME TRYING.SONOS does not tell you this and most people assume it when they purchase them. I personally would not have bought my first MOVE speaker or the second MOVE speaker later if I knew it could not form a true stereo pair while in Bluetooth. I now have spent 800.00 on something I did not need and I feel I was misled on. I should have done much more investigating prior to purchase. Maybe hired someone. And it was not easy to find out that Bluetooth pairing did not work after hours of trying post purchase. I am not very happy with the deliberate hiding of this by SONUS. I love the sound that they produce while hooked to WI-FI but they knowingly hid the fact that it will not do a stereo pair while on Bluetooth. JUST WRONG! Shareholder/Stock price over customers does not work in the long run. SAD AND DISAPOINTED.


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19 replies

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This is on the Sonos Move product page under the FAQ section:

https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/move.html

 

I just use a dual-stream bluetooth transmitter and happily play music to both ‘Moves’ in perfect sync when out in the garden. All I need now is more hot weather here in the U.K.😁

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07J58KY3X

The above works fine for me and it comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts all day.

JUST WRONG! Shareholder/Stock price over customers does not work in the long run. SAD AND DISAPOINTED.

 

I can understand why you think Sonos should have mentioned pairing limitations in some place other than the FAQ, or worded differently, but I’m not following how you conclude communication decisions were made because of stock price.

Especially because Sonos speaker stereo pairing is the norm, I agree that it is poor communication to not highlight somewhere that this one does not do this in BT mode - although in the bluetooth speaker market, stereo pairing isn't an automatic given.

Just curious though - where do you need this feature to work?

Just curious though - where do you need this feature to work?

I suspect this goes to the heart of Sonos’ decision not to include this feature on the Move or Roam.  They believe (and probably have evidence to suggest) that the proportion of people who really must have stereo music to accompany their picnic is very small.

Userlevel 7
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New community member, first post,lots of shouting and insulting.  DFTT

I suspect this goes to the heart of Sonos’ decision not to include this feature on the Move or Roam.  

My experience of BT speakers that do this via BT is that the link up can be flaky. Perhaps that is an issue inherent to BT, and may be another reason for the Sonos decision.

But I wish they would allow the Roam to bond with Sub via WiFi! Because I still believe that a Roam pair + Sub, over WiFi for use inside the home, would sound a lot better than one may think. And if so, it would be a very cool dual use system.

I suspect this goes to the heart of Sonos’ decision not to include this feature on the Move or Roam.  

My experience of BT speakers that do this via BT is that the link up can be flaky. Perhaps that is an issue inherent to BT, and may be another reason for the Sonos decision.

 

 

I haven’t ever used BT stereo pairing on any speakers, so I can’t speak to how reliable it is.  However, I would add that another possible reason why the feature wasn’t included with Move/Roam is that it makes the products more difficult to use.  I currently have a pair of Roams that are paired over WiFi.  When I put one of them in BT mode, the stereo pair is automatically split up...which is very annoying to me. I don’t want to switch to BT mode unless I really want it because of this complication.  Now consider if Sonos had the ability let you do a BT stereo pair.  Would that mean you would always need to put both speakers in BT mode to use it for BT?  If not, how would the speakers now you whether you want to do just one speaker or both speakers as a stereo pair?  Maybe you want to have both speakers used in BT from different sources?  And after building in all those options in a way that’s simple and logical to control, you still have to be able to put the speakers back as a stereo pair in an non-cumbersome fashion.

Maybe some of these issues are easy to deal with then I think.  Maybe there are other issues I’m not thinking of.  The point is that it seems likely that adding BT stereo pairing to a WIFi capable speaker like Sonos might be a bit more difficult than it appears when you’re looking at it on the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

"The point is that it seems likely that adding BT stereo pairing to a WIFi capable speaker like Sonos might be a bit more difficult than it appears when you’re looking at it on the surface"

 

Well, I agree that it may be difficult... But most capable engineers would consider "difficult" to be an interesting challenge.  I know software engineers that can write code to butter toast.  Sadly, they don't work for Sonos.

 

And the ability to butter toast implies some different hardware, too. Which may not exist in the Move or Roam. That being said, I don’t know which chipset is in use by Sonos, or even if it is capable of stereo Bluetooth. My point is that it may not be only software related. 

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Just curious though - where do you need this feature to work?

I suspect this goes to the heart of Sonos’ decision not to include this feature on the Move or Roam.  They believe (and probably have evidence to suggest) that the proportion of people who really must have stereo music to accompany their picnic is very small.

Hotels and serviced apartments. There 11 million digital nomads (according to Harvard Business Review) and we travel all the time. You cannot connect these to hotel internet (unless Sonos decides to add a web browser to the app) :smile:
https://hbr.org/2021/07/your-company-needs-a-digital-nomad-policy
 

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And the ability to butter toast implies some different hardware, too. Which may not exist in the Move or Roam. That being said, I don’t know which chipset is in use by Sonos, or even if it is capable of stereo Bluetooth. My point is that it may not be only software related. 

Any $20 set of wireless earbuds on Amazon is capable of stereo bluetooth. I hope this $340 set of speakers has at least as good a bluetooth profile as that.

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I suspect this goes to the heart of Sonos’ decision not to include this feature on the Move or Roam.  

My experience of BT speakers that do this via BT is that the link up can be flaky. Perhaps that is an issue inherent to BT, and may be another reason for the Sonos decision.

But I wish they would allow the Roam to bond with Sub via WiFi! Because I still believe that a Roam pair + Sub, over WiFi for use inside the home, would sound a lot better than one may think. And if so, it would be a very cool dual use system.

Every set of wireless earbuds manages to do it just fine. 

I’d love to see it too. But my point as made in the quoted post remains. 

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I just use a dual-stream bluetooth transmitter and happily play music to both ‘Moves’ in perfect sync when out in the garden. All I need now is more hot weather here in the U.K.😁

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07J58KY3X

The above works fine for me and it comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts all day.

But this requires a wired connection to the device, right?
What we need is a Bluetooth device that can send and receive simultaneously. 

I just use a dual-stream bluetooth transmitter and happily play music to both ‘Moves’ in perfect sync when out in the garden. All I need now is more hot weather here in the U.K.😁

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07J58KY3X

The above works fine for me and it comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts all day.

But this requires a wired connection to the device, right?
What we need is a Bluetooth device that can send and receive simultaneously. 

 

No wired connection to the sonos speaker. Many (all?) Android devices have dual stream BT built-in. 

And the ability to butter toast implies some different hardware, too. Which may not exist in the Move or Roam. That being said, I don’t know which chipset is in use by Sonos, or even if it is capable of stereo Bluetooth. My point is that it may not be only software related. 

Any $20 set of wireless earbuds on Amazon is capable of stereo bluetooth. I hope this $340 set of speakers has at least as good a bluetooth profile as that.

 

I wonder if the fact the two speakers are only expected to operate under a foot makes a difference. Really,  I wonder.

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I just use a dual-stream bluetooth transmitter and happily play music to both ‘Moves’ in perfect sync when out in the garden. All I need now is more hot weather here in the U.K.😁

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07J58KY3X

The above works fine for me and it comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts all day.

But this requires a wired connection to the device, right?
What we need is a Bluetooth device that can send and receive simultaneously. 

 

No wired connection to the sonos speaker. Many (all?) Android devices have dual stream BT built-in. 

But wired to the source?

Or is it simultaneous TX/RX?

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And the ability to butter toast implies some different hardware, too. Which may not exist in the Move or Roam. That being said, I don’t know which chipset is in use by Sonos, or even if it is capable of stereo Bluetooth. My point is that it may not be only software related. 

Any $20 set of wireless earbuds on Amazon is capable of stereo bluetooth. I hope this $340 set of speakers has at least as good a bluetooth profile as that.

 

I wonder if the fact the two speakers are only expected to operate under a foot makes a difference. Really,  I wonder.

Would be distance to the source that matters. I can put my earbuds in different rooms and they both play.