Can you connect more than one Sonos Roam via Bluetooth

Some Android devices have a dual audio Bluetooth feature that allows you to connect to two Bluetooth devices at once.

I don’t believe the Bluetooth audio spec has any definition or allowances for daisy chaining devices. As indicated, it’s likely the best you could do is to find one of these Android devices that allow Dual Bluetooth. 

As I understand it, a daisy chain would require any device to be both a receiver and a broadcaster. I haven’t seen any Bluetooth devices that have that capability, but I haven’t particularly looked, either. If you know of such devices with the capability to both receive and send a Bluetooth signal at the same time, please post about it. 

Soundcore Bluetooth speakers as well as JBL and UE allow up to 100 chained Bluetooth speakers. I really wish Sonos would allow stereo pairing of the Roam and Move over Bluetooth.

Thank you, Corry!  I’ve been reviewing the many community notes related to this feature request for the past hour and was just about to give up concluding that no one from Sonos was paying any attention.  You’ve restored my faith!

I have 4 Fives, an Amp, a Port, and two Moves.  I just got back from a week at the coast where we took the two Moves along to provide stereo in our Condo.  They worked wonderfully once we paired them to the condo wifi.  We’re camping next week and I was disappointed to realize that the Moves don’t support Bluetooth pairing. I regretted selling the pair of UE Booms I used to use as a stereo pair on camping trips before investing in Sonos as my unified music solution.

Bluetooth stereo pairing strikes me as the distinguishing characteristic that would make the Roam fit perfectly in the Sonos portfolio.  When at home, we’d use them to supplement our system in smaller less frequently used rooms that currently don’t have speakers, but when camping or going to the beach, we’d bring them along as a portable Bluetooth stereo pair.

I’ve read all the speculation in the community about the lack of stereo pairing was a deliberate choice by Sonos or an oversight.  My own speculation is that Sonos is optimized for WiFi and includes complex logic for dealing with latency etc and that Bluetooth stereo pairing requires one of the speakers to act as both a receiver and transmitter so that it can receive the stereo input then play one channel locally and send the other channel to the second daisy-chained speaker.

From an engineering perspective, this is probably viewed as a fairly large development effort that tacks away from Sonos’ core strength and positioning as a high-end multi-room wifi-based system.  I’d like to humbly suggest to the product management team that the effort is worth it because with this feature, having a pair of Roams becomes a no-brainer choice for every Sonos system owner.  Why have a dedicated portable pair from another vendor when an all-Sonos solution covers that use case and also lets those portable speakers also extend your whole house audio when at home?

I suppose there’s a counterargument that portable stereo pairs are a small segment of the portable USB speaker market.  But, I would predict that segment is MUCH larger among Sonos customers -- we chose Sonos despite the high price point precisely because we value sound quality and multi-speaker configurations.

I’d appreciate you adding these thoughts to the feature request.  And while I understand that you can’t comment on whether this feature will ever be implemented, I hope you can answer one small but important related question:

Would it be technically feasible for Sonos to add Bluetooth stereo pairing to Roam as a software-only update, or is it a fundamental architectural change that would require hardware changes or otherwise be something that would have to wait for the release of another model?

For me personally, if I knew this was a software upgrade that was coming sometime in the future, I’d buy a pair of Roams today.  But without knowing that, I will buy one, at most.

Hi @jaycincotta 

I can’t really comment on that either. However, given the similar feedback received about the Move, it would be strange if we didn’t address it on the Roam in some way, some time.

Absolutely agree. This is a feature that would be great for both Move and Roam speakers. Hoping the development team are able to look at this :)

brian

Or, use the Wi-Fi/Sonos Net facility that they’ve already developed, to sync the audio between the two devices.

(The only reason not to do it that way would be if the mobile devices are lacking some hardware to allow them to do it? The Move surely cannot be lacking the CPU power to do it)

FYI,  Roam and Move cannot connect to Sonosnet like the other speakers.  The ‘net’ part of Sonosnet expects the wireless devices to be stationary for the most part, which obviously doesn’t apply for portable speakers.  Instead, the portables use your router’s WiFi directly.  That doesn’t mean that they can’t be in sync with your other Sonos speakers.  Also, whether connected by Sonosnet or WiFi, your home router is giving each speaker an IP address.

It’s the last part, the IP address, that would be a problem when your away from home, if you’re wanting to use WiFi protocols to do the syncing.  Not saying syncing isn’t possible, just that it would have to done a different way.

As a sidenote,  if you 2 phones/tablets, you could setup one of them as a hotspot, then connect the portables and the 2nd phone/tablet to the hotspot network.  They you could use your speakers like normal without bluetooth.

Sure. This was just a comment, on the back of another suggesting that doing it over Bluetooth would require some whole new development effort. My point was solely that code already exists to do it over Wi-Fi protocols.

You say Move (and Roam) doesn’t participate in Sonosnet, but do you know (and are you able to say) if that is a software or a hardware restriction (beyond a possible protocol assumption that the devices aren’t moving. Latency estimation, I assume)