Meet Sonos Roam, the ultra-portable smart speaker

Looks a bit clunky, will wait for something more deserving of the roam

Got my 2 x Sonos Roams today. One white, one black. I thought this would make it easier for stereo pairing. 

So it sounds good, especially as a stereo pair.

However I am a little disappointed by the UX for pairing. 

I thought that pairing and unpairing would be as easy as tapping a button on the app. Unfortunately this is not how it works. The pairing itself is easy, but the unpairing causes one of the speakers to disappear from the app and I have to add the missing Roam again and rename it.

Would be much better if, for instance, I could select to play audio from Roam Black, or Roam White, or Roam Stereo Pair from the list of speakers (rooms). 

It's a minor quibble.

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Also noteworthy- I have a IKEA Symphonisk speaker in my Kitchen and I have to say the Roam sounds a lot better and has a much more stable connection to my WiFi. The Symphonisk drops out frequently whereas I walked around my home holding my Roams and I haven't had a single drop out. 

Thanks for that post Duran! I was holding off buying a pair until I read about some real-life stereo pairing and unpairing. Wonder if Sonos can make it easier to do it with an update? 

The is pretty standard stereo pairing functionality for Sonos.  It’s not meant to be something you can do on the fly as you’re suggesting.  It’s not just a matter of changing from mono to stereo, but all other speakers and smart home devices in your home knowing how to reference your speakers.  As well, I would expect to see your 2nd speaker show up in the room list as ‘living room 1’ or something similar, rather than having to re-add it to the system.  Been a while since I’ve split a stereo pair though, so perhaps I’m misremembering or things have changed.

My garden is on an acre area. I walked around my garden with roam stereo pair. No drop outs. 

That's fair. It's just that the Roam is meant to be more portable of course, and some of the marketing made it sound like the Roam could automatically mesh with other rooms as you move about the house. It might well do the latter but I haven't experimented enough with that.

I know one of the common criticisms on the Roam is that it can't pair with the home theatre array but as an experiment I placed the Roam Stereo Pair in my Theatre Room to the far left and right of my Arc and then grouped the Theatre Room and the Roam Stereo Pair. I had to tweak the volume manually to find the right balance, but the grouping did expand the overall stereoscopic effect. I don't know how much it impacted the Atmos output though, because I have never really been able to distinguish the 3D effect of Atmos from ordinary 5+1 surround. 

I was thinking ‘lunar white’ might not stand out as much as the white tends to, but I was not expecting this.

In case any one is interested, the paint is Valspar’s “Metropolis” color.  Available at Lowes in the US, probably a lot of other places.

When fully charged and standing on the QI charger the Android controller refreshes / redraws the “My SONOS” page every second and is not usable since it resets the view. The problem stops when removing the Roam speaker from the charger and starts if I put it back. This is both with the latest update (13.0.5) end the one before it.

The SONOS Roam speaker doesn’t report the battery level like other devices when using Bluetooth - that would be a nice feature!

Previously the only Sonos device I had with an kind of input is the Beam, I love the fact that with the Roam I can connect bluetooth and then group any of the Play:1s and Ikea lamps I have, then they all play the bluetooth source.  I didn’t realise you could do that 

Even more reason to love my little Roam 

I may have spoken too soon regarding stereo pairing with the Roam.  I have several different stereo pairs of other Sonos speakers, and the behavior has always been the same.  The pair is created through the app.  If one of the pair leaves the network for whatever reason, the remaining speakers acts alone in mono, maintaining the same Sonos room.  When the other speakers gets powered on, back on, the speaker pair is reformed.

That’s not been my experiece with the Roam. I create the stereo pair and everything is great.  When one of the pair is removed (powered off or put in bluetooth mode), the remaining speaker plays alone, as I expected.  However, when the other speaker is back and fully available, the speaker pair isn’t automatically reformed...I now see 2 separate Roam rooms. 

Not sure if this is the expected functionality of Roam speaker pairs or not, as I really need to play with it some more, but I don’t like it.  I don’t want to have to do the speaker pairing setup, although it’s easy, and I don’t like the implications to all the smart home controls I have in place.  it also seems like I’m losing the Sonos room name I chose every time this happens.

I do get the complication of this though, considering Bluetooth functionality.  I mean, when I put a speaker in Bluetooth mode (and still connected to WiFi) the speaker pair has to be split up, since you can’t do a speaker pair in Bluetooth mode. There wouldn’t be a way for a speaker to share it’s bluetooth connection with the rest of your speakers if it remained as speaker pair.   Even if you could do a speaker pair in bluetooth mode, basically have a pair operating as a single entity in all cases, I would guess people would not want to always bring both speakers while using them away from home,  so it creates problems there too.

Unless I’m missing something, which is entirely possible, this issue is going to really deter me from using these outside of my home.  I really like them as pair, plugged in and used like any other Sonos speaker, but don’t want all my settings messed up when I start switching modes on one of them.  If I really want to use bluetooth extensively, either away from the home or as a source for my Sonos system, then a single Roam is a better option.

Hi @melvimbe,

I’ve checked with our engineering team, and they’ve confirmed that this is expected behaviour. Roam Stereo Pairs can be relatively fragile and are more susceptible to be being broken than that of stereo pairs of other players. Additionally, Roam Stereo pairs don't automatically recreate after being broken.

There are three main reasons why a stereo pair of Roams can be broken:

• If one targets a member of a Roam stereo pair via bluetooth it will break the pair
• If one member of the Roam stereo pair is physically moved elsewhere it will break the pair
• If one member of the Roam stereo pair runs out of battery it will break the stereo pair

It seems like you’re hitting point number 2 which explains what you’ve written above. Currently, when a Roam stereo pair is broken, it has to be manually recreated in app. I understand that’s not the experience you’re looking for, and I’ve fed this back to the Product Development team for future consideration. If you have any other questions let me know.

Thanks for this James.  That’s a good comprehensive answer.   I think I’ve experienced points 1 and 2.  It also seems like just powering off a speaker breaks the pair, but I suspect perhaps that’s a part of point 2 (or 3).  The result is that one of the speakers just isn’t ‘there’ to pair with, and therefore, the pair is broken.  I would like for the pair to reform when the missing speaker returns, but I can also see why that would be somewhat confusing since that’s not an option for point 1 (bluetooth).  I would guess that in normal everyday use, point 1 is what will break a pair most often...my random testing doesn’t reflect typical use.

While I’m talking about negatives, I also can’t seem to get the speaker swap function to work.  This is most likely is user error, as I’m not sure I’m holding and releasing the play/pause button with the right timing.  I personally would rather have an additional button for speaker swapping, rather than reusing the same buttons.  Same goes for the power/bluetooth mode button.

I really am pretty impressed with the sound quality.  It’s great for small spaces, and I don’t really feel like the bass is missing or doesn’t get loud enough.  Also tried it on my android with both speakers connected via bluetooth (mono) and thought it was pretty impressive,   And I am surprised how much I like it in lunar white.

The timing for Sound Swap is something that took me a bit of practice too. You’re listening for the third, higher pitched chime when holding the Play/Pause button down. The only way I can describe the sound pattern is like this:

First chime - immediately upon button press - bleep
Second chime - approx 1 second later - bloop (lower than bleep)
Third chime - approx 1 second later - blipblip (this one is quieter than the other two)
Release

I found it easier to try “pulling” audio from another speaker to Roam to hear the chimes a bit clearer.

Bought the Roam as a bathroom speaker and really happy with it for that purpose. One issue I am noticing is that I can manually turn the speaker off, but opening the Sonos app will awaken it - and keep it awake. This means the battery is draining much faster than I would like it to, is there a way to prevent it doing this? Or have it go to sleep? I access the Sonos app a fair amount for using other speakers.

This was one reason I bought two.

Any chance there will be an update that will allow a Roam stereo pair to connect to a Bluetooth device?  Especially an LG webOS TV.

Nice thing :-)
I would like to be able to set the speaker to WiFi under my home profile via BT, for example at a friend's home or vacation, and run all the set services where I will be.
Without a phone and its BT connection. Is there any way to do this?
When I connect to Roam via BT - it doesn't allow me to set up WiFi ..

HIFIpartner (CZ)

Apologies if covered previously but answering my own question a little here...found the following article: https://support.sonos.com/s/article/5029?language=en_US#:~:text=To%20place%20your%20Roam%20into,last%20up%20to%2010%20days.

Long press will prevent it waking up.

There should be a sleep mode button in the app itself.  The power button on the back is kind of dodgy -- since it has to be flat for waterproof purposes.  So it can be difficult to tell when you get a good press.  Or, if you use the app, it should ONLY power on the Roam if you target music to the Roam (not just generally turning on the app) -- I realize this can be difficult to implement, since if the speaker is offline, you can’t target it.  But there has to be a more efficient way to do this.  Maybe a wake/sleep button in the app itself.  

Short answer “No”

the auto TruePlay feature of Roam and Move is only for the speaker itself and does not tune other models.

How can I determine when my Roam will be shipped? Ordered on 3/19, status is ‘ordered’...

You’ll need to speak to our sales team to check the status of your current order. 

Maybe I have missed this somewhere, but does anyone know if the S2 app interface (with Sonos radio etc) can be used with roam in bluetooth mode when not on wifi ?

Daryl

Currently no. That is and has been a major request by yours truly and others. Especially the paid version which I have.