Sonos Roam Disappointed, over priced Bluetooth speaker

  • 29 June 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 180 views

My wife gave me this for Fathers day. I was excited to get it connect to my Sonos system.. I quickly learned that it will not work with the Sonos s1 controller. Well here is the problem I have A lot of money in speakers and amps, None of them are compatible with the new controller including the black amp and the Move. Looking at the compatible list very little of the equipment will move over to the new controller. And it seem that the new equipment will not work with the old. This leaves me in a predicament, I cannot setup the Roam to work with my other home equipment, I have to setup the speaker with the Gold controller. NOTE - you cannot setup Bluetooth until the speaker is registered with a controller….That was not an east task when the gold controller kept trying to upgrade my home system. Finally got it and i have 1 speaker on the gold controller , once connected i could setup Bluetooth. I closed the gold controller  and reopened and the system defaulted to trying to upgrade my system again.. But lucky for me i can Bluetooth to the roam now. Making this a very expensive Bluetooth speaker only.  Sonos if you are going to charge the price at least make the equipment and controller backward compatible. I love your products and concepts. But i will not upgrade my system every time you release a new controller. I will not be buying anymore equipment if it is not compatible to use with my existing system and can merge into my system. At least make the new controller smart enough to auto disable features that the older equipment does not have.  Now for the sound and quality of the Roam, It is as you expect it to be for a sonos speaker. The sound is full as it can be for its size. I'm not disappointed in the sound and quality. But in saying all that. I will probably be returning the Roam and getting a nice Bluetooth speaker. Its not worth the money if i cannot use it with my home system.. 


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3 replies

At the time of the S1/S2 divide, Sonos did wifely publicise that all "new" Sonos products released after that date would be for an S2 Household only - the S1 software would not be developed, but would receive updates to help keep existing services running in the App and for security update purposes only.

You therefore will only be able to add "existing" products to your S1 system.

Note there is one slight exception to the rule which relates to the Sonos One SL speaker - if that is updated to S2, there is no process to step it back to S1. 

Feel free of course to speak to the retailer, or Sonos Support, about the return of your Roam. They can be contacted via this LINK.

According to your profile here, the only product you own that is potentially not S2 compatible is the Connect:AMP (the white one). Your Move, Play:1, Amp (the black one) and Boost can all work on S2. And even the connect:amp could be S2 compatible, if it's a later version.

If you don't want to sacrifice the old Connect:amp, fine, but saying that most of your setup (at least as  you've described it in your profile) cannot be upgraded to S2 is not true.

However, I would recommend you to check if the connect:amp is of a new enough generation to be S2 compatible, because then you could upgrade your system to S2 and use all of your devices on it.

To be clear: the short list of devices on the compatibility page consists of products that will work only with S2. The list of devices that will work with both ccontrollers and can therefore be upgraded to work in 1 system with the Roam is much longer and includes devices introduced as far back as 2013.

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Not to mention they give you a nice discount for trade in on the S1 item