I’m sure there are a ton of conversations on this forum already about the inability to stereo pair Sonos speakers while traveling. I’m presently traveling and can’t use 2 of my Sonos speakers for stereo sound while browsing my computer on top of my bed. And so that’s why I’m here writing to this forum. In the past I’ve shrugged this off, but this scenario keeps coming up over and over any time I go traveling. Hotels and AirBnBs, camp sites, a friend’s house... I’m not there long enough where it’s worth going through the trouble of migrating all my devices over to a temporary wifi network. The process is not quick at all, riddled with obscure timeouts, and when I do it once to connect to the temporary network, I then have to do it again to pair back to my home network. Very cumbersome.
My understanding is that Sonos already has “SonosNet”, a separate WiFi network from the home internet that coordinates all the speakers. If my understanding is correct, that means that Sonos speakers have the capability to delegate a host to broadcast and manage SonosNet for the rest of the speakers in the system.
With that said, I wonder why the Sonos Roam (when outdoors) couldn’t just start its own SonosNet when connected to Bluetooth such that when I power on my other Sonos Roam, the stereo pair remembers from when it was on my home network and just instantly plays in stereo as soon as it powers on… I see this already happen if one speaker is connected to Bluetooth and both are on the home WiFi, but it needs to be taken further and work *away* from the crutch of the home wifi. This would be a huge QoL update where “it just works”. I think the fuss of re-connecting speakers to a temporary AirBnB wifi or even my own “travel router” is just not quick and is riddled with timeouts. I think it makes the process very unattractive for people used to the ease of PartyBoost or SoundLink… Both of those use WiFi protocols just like SonosNet. I just don’t understand why Sonos couldn’t push out meaningful updates that improve the product after its purchased - just like Apple or Tesla. It feels like my Roams are “stuck in the past” since day 1 and this is my daily driver for a bluetooth speaker. No, I do not want to carry a travel router. I invite you to try it, it’s not fun!
The goal is to quickly fill an AirBnB, camp site or hotel room with room-corrected sound on the go without carrying an additional router. (why not delegate 1 speaker to being a router for other Sonos speakers in bluetooth mode?) I just can’t achieve this with Sonos and it just makes options like SoundLink more attractive for these use cases. But seriously, I want to use Sonos because of the sound quality that can be achieved. It’s these moments when I’m traveling and I bring my Sonos speakers to an AirBnB with all my friends when I need this the most. And it can’t take forever to set up because there’s usually a million other things going on. “On-the-go” is how you get Sonos as a brand in front of friends of product owners. They get a positive impression and eventually purchase the product, too. And because the product would be easy to use on the go (no router fuss), it’s an easy recommendation. That organic word-of-mouth would put Sonos is a very strong position IMO.
I really wish Sonos took their software a lot more seriously than they currently do. Currently we’re not thinking with the mindset that a product can be better after it’s sold to a customer. And it doesn’t seem to me there’s a good excuse. Sonos speakers are Linux computers with updatable firmware. My car from 5 years ago has features that didn’t exist 5 years ago. I was hoping that when I purchase a smart speaker that all the inconvenient things I do regularly eventually get ironed out with a software update. But that doesn’t seem to be happening and it’s just like a really big “Come on, Sonos”.
The Sonosnet function is phased out by Sonos and Sonos started this on their mobile devices that never supported Sonosnet, purportedly because Sonos found Sonosnet would become unstable if you removed speakers from it more than occasionally if I remember the desiccations at the time the Move (Gen 1) was introduced. So not only would Sonos have to make Sonosnet work on the Roam, it would have to make Sonosnet available on the Roam to.
SonosNet was developed in 2005 when consumer level mesh networks were virtually unknown, expensive, and not so easy to setup. SonosNet just worked. Now, 20 years later, the 10/100 top capability of SonosNet is not very exciting. The older units don’t have enough RAM to support field upgrades of the Linux Kernal and they may be too slow to properly support the new features.
SONOS does a decent job of supporting its older hardware. I had to recycle a perfectly functional 2005 era cellphone because the cell towers stopped supporting it. Also, the WiFi cards baked into older players, can’t take advantage of any WiFi 5, 6, 7 features, yet the old SonosNet S1 units continue to work well.
For audio equipment the expectation is: “buy once, use forever”. This mindset worked well in 20th Century, but technology is now moving faster and equipment will become functionally obsolete before failing due to age. That 1980’s gear might be playing CD’s just fine, but there is no HDMI-eARC jack or streaming service.
It does look like Sonos is trying to address some of the aging out issues they originally baked into the system. Adding more memory and particularly non-volatile memory with higher write endurance is going to help long term usability. It helps that th8ngs are cheap today that back in 2000 were very pricey, or just not available.
It is hard to see from outside but from the look of things they may be working to stay more current with the underlying OS level software rather than patching obsolete versions. Part of that issue was a huge requirements expansion of the core OS that obsoleted a LOT of hardware when it just wouldn't fit.
Hopefully as part of the software/firmware redesign they have moved to a more modular structure too.
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