Why No Bluetooth Stereo on Move and Roam?

Isn't the fact that WiFi and Bluetooth pairing are different technologies part of the explanation why Sonos has not incorporated BT pairing? It is certainly possible and Sonos have chosen not to add it. I presume this was a purely commercial judgement. Sonos may be right and they may be wrong, but despite what some contributors to this thread seem to think, they are not stupid.

I kinda answered this above. The earlier poster was wrong to say “If it can be done via Wi-Fi why not via Bluetooth?” That’s not relevant because they are different technologies and cannot be compared. But both technologies are independently able to use two independent speakers as a stereo pair. 

Also, whether they are stupid or not is irrelevant. But it IS ridiculous that speakers that were designed to travel speakers with stereo pairing CANNOT BE USED IN ANY HOTEL CHAIN IN THE WORLD as a stereo pair. So it is is not a stretch to say, “Yeah, that decision (or oversight) was pretty stupid.”

Sorry, I disagree.  Your statement is only valid if this is how a worthwhile proportion of users want to use the speakers, and don’t buy them because this feature is absent.  I don’t know if that is the case or not.  My guess is that Sonos think not, or at least that its absence at launch would not significantly affect sales.  I suspect they are right, but of course I don’t know that.  It cannot possibly be an oversight, because the same things were said about the Move.  Right or wrong, it is a deliberate choice.

But anyway, there are clearly some users - and potential users - out there who would value this feature highly, and they have every right to make that request on here.  I would not be at all surprised if this feature were added at some point, and I shall be happy for those who want it if it happens.

One aspect of this that has not been mention is that the feature needs to be easy to use.  Sonos surely would not want to implement a feature if it’s too complicated for most customers to want to use.  And although bluetooth stereo pairing is an easy feature for a device that only does bluetooth, it gets a bit more complicated when the speaker also does WiFi.

So in the case where a Roam/Move can be paired in WiFi (Sonos room) or bluetooth, you can configure two speakers (call them A and B in the following ways.

1 -  A  is a Sonos room, and B is a separate Sonos room

1a  - A is a Sonos room, B is bluetooth

1b -  A is bluetooth, B is a Sonos room

1c - A is bluetooth, Bi is bluetooth, but not a stereo pair

1d  - A &B are a bluetooth stereo pair

2 - A&B are a stereo pair Sonos room

2a  - A is a Sonos room, B is bluetooth

2b -  A is bluetooth, B is a Sonos room

2c - A is bluetooth, Bi is bluetooth, but not a stereo pair

2d  - A &B are a bluetooth stereo pair.

(1) and (2) would be done through setup, but all the variations need to be able done quickly, likely through hard buttons on the speaker, in order for them to meet an ‘ease of use’ standard.    You also need to easily be able to get them back to their original Sonos room(s) state….something they don’t do very well right now, in my opinion.

Oh, and lets not forget that a Roam can be on Wifi and bluetooth at the same time, which complicates things a lot more.  How would that work for the different scenarios?  Say you had a stereo pair Sonos room, that you wanted to split to two different bluetooth sources, and then share the two audio streams with the rest of your system.  How can you send two stream from what Sonos sees as a single Sonos room? Or perhaps you have two Sonos rooms, but you want to use them as a stereo pair over bluetooth, while sharing the audio stream with the rest of your system.  Maybe you have to put in some rules that allows some situations but not others?

There’s also auto trueplay tuning, and smart home control impacts that need to be looked at.  Not sure they are more complicated with bluetooth stereo pair, but that would need to be thought through.

The point is that although bluetooth stereo pairing is easy to do in abstract sense, when you get down to the practicality of a pair of speakers used for WiFi and bluetooth in multiple ways, ease of use gets a lot harder to accomplish.

Excellent insights Danny.  It shows how daft a comment is “There are $20 BT speakers that can pair” (apart from probably being incorrect).  To dredge up an old analogy, a Dacia Duster can go off-road and a Ferrari Testarossa can’t, but it doesn’t mean that the Dacia is a better car, or that you’d want to modify the Ferrari.

Buying new pair of speakers for portable use.

C’mon Sonos, still no stereo pair on bluetooth Roam? Dealbreaker for me :-(

Gonna throw my bucks to Flare 2 most probably..

I was interested in getting a pair of Roam speakers, until I found out that Bluetooth pairing for stereo isn’t available. I’ll probably get some other brand that has that feature, and unless they turn out to be crap I doubt if I would return for Roam speakers even if the Bluetooth feature becomes available later. That’s my 2 cents.

“Or the bunny gets it” posting aside, if you are uninterested in the Sonos Wi-Fi features of the Roam, it is probably best to get a plain old Bluetooth speaker.  

It’s not that I’m uninterested in the Wi-Fi. I would probably use that more often than Bluetooth. When Bluetooth is the only option, I would want stereo pairing.

I don’t agree, this is an important feature that my old Bose micro speakers support and I love! I am also sure that many Sonos users would buy more than one roam or move if they could be paired!