End of Software Support - Clarifications

End of Software Support - Clarifications
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C

Totally correct, Sonos is very ambigous about what they mean by ‘continue to operate’.  They also make ambiguous statements about segregating the network.   But this misses the point, if I have to segregate my network then these aren’t working as a group, and they aren’t fit for the use they were sold as.    If the network must segregate, then it’s broken, and these devices are now junk.   “Whole Home Audio” can not be a segregated network.

R
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I upgraded and recycled 6 ZP100 Amps to the latest Amp late December before Christmas.

5 Sonos Amps and a new Move. To the tune of over 2K even with the discount.

I am now told that the 3 remaining Connect:Amps and 2 Play5 Gen1s are on the list.

I dont expect the legacy items to update any further but I do expect them to be able to play and group with my newer models. From the wording I keep seeing I am getting very leary.

Several of the responses say they will work as they do now but never quite say they will group/play with the newer hardware.

Just realized my 45 day return is coming up in about 7 days. Really thinking hard about returning and just keeping everything legacy because of this.

So Sonos, you are about to lose a recent 6 item purchase and any future purchases.

If i dont get a response this week making me feel assured my total system will work the way it does today you may be losing a existing sell and any future sales.

Your wording is always legacy will work the same and new ones update. But never the total system will work together with grouping and streaming. I dont want two systems! That's not why I have Sonos. I have it for Whole Home Audio! over 15 zones, 20 devices.

I would be upgrading in the future just like i did at Christmas but not under this kind of vision.

 

 

 

It’s been pretty clearly stated in various places that all speakers will not continue to work together if you want your “Modern” kit to get software updates.  They will definitely be two totally separate systems unable to group across legacy and modern.

 

Incidentally - SONOS share price down almost 3% again today in the first 90 minutes after the market opened,  Down almost 10% in the last 5 days.  I see it going further and it has gathered pace each day.

 

 

I
Userlevel 1

A lot of upset people here, I’m fairly certain the CEO of Sonos doesn’t read these groups… so sign the S.O.S. Petition (Save Our Sonos) at http://chng.it/fpZkq2mj

 

We love our Sonos but per other users, new management has been brought in and their ideas for how to grow sales, are abusive to customers. So much so that they broke the Internet. Let them know you expect clarity and fairness. Not stories that are bad for customers, who only expect the story they were promised, it all just works together.

H
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Sonos SELL premium products. If they are designed to be replaced after 5 to 10 years, then they’re not premium. Might as well as spend a lot less to get the same functionality and replace every 5 to 10 years. If I was buying 1 product, fine, but most buy 5, 10, 20 or more units. You can’t expect customers to suddenly replace half of their large investments in just a few months and at a paltry 30% discount. The products have gone up in price and the dollar has become very strong. Two factors they probably didn’t consider or more worringly, they can’t adapt to lower their prices or offer larger discounts.

They obviously expected a backlash, but I think even this has surprised them. The damage is done. Only a solution that allows the current system to coexist with the newer products while allowing grouping as it was designed, will repair some of the damage. We don’t need the latest technology to run on legacy equipment. We want it to work as is. If it doesn’t in the future, they should either offer a very large discount OR offer a Sonos box that allows the legacy to work in a mixed system. However, when the next batch like Play 1 & 3’s go into legacy, they must have a solution for that. So plan ahead and tell us how you’re going to deal with this soon. For a technology company with very intelligent and technical people to NOT have a proposed solution in the works before making an announcement on legacy equipment, IS beyond a joke. 

The Board must either think we’re naive or were totally unprepared. Based on the statement from the CEO, it seems both. They need to clarify with DETAIL within a few weeks, otherwise, the longer it goes on, the harder it will hit their bottom line and as a public company, that will get a reaction both in the share price and from their investors.

Sonos units AREN’T computers with speakers added! They are foremost speakers with technology to stream music and radio. We don’t use them to browse the internet, buy clothes, send email. We just need the basics AS designed.

Sonos are at a crossroads and if they make the wrong turn, they’ll suffer and at best they’ll be bought out. To try and make customers think this is just about technology moving forward, is the kind of thing politicians do. We know it’s not the complete truth and there are underlying reasons why this is being done. But, imho, you’ve messed up big time. You’ve alienated your core customer base who also act as ambassadors for your brand and help sell new units. Now that has stopped!!

Read, listen, think and then do the RIGHT thing. You have a great chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Sonos has placed so much doubt in me as a customer, I’m not sure if I trust them anymore. Can the company survive on this new approach? So maybe buying more Sonos in the future will be a bad investment? As for most of us, this has opened our eyes and we’re looking at what the market is offering and in 2020, there are a lot more options than when I jumped in to Sonos and at a price that is very attractive.

One more chance Sonos, just one more and you have to hit the nail on the head. It’s amazing how one week can totally change one’s perspective on a company that was viewed so positively and had a brand loyalty that others would die for. 

You know what to do. So as Nike says. JUST DO IT!

 

 

Agree on all points, and very well worded.

One thing that keeps going through my head, is how many 10’s or 100’s of thousands of Sonos customers never needed to look elsewhere, it was a given that all future spend would be on Sonos as and when required. Like when I bought two Moves to add to my system last year, no way would I have looked elsewhere, but that’s all changed in the last week.

As you say, they’ve now got one chance to fix this situation.

If this week continues with just the existing CEO announcement from last week, then that simply isn’t enough to change things.
 

G
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Totally correct, Sonos is very ambigous about what they mean by ‘continue to operate’.  They also make ambiguous statements about segregating the network.   But this misses the point, if I have to segregate my network then these aren’t working as a group, and they aren’t fit for the use they were sold as.    If the network must segregate, then it’s broken, and these devices are now junk.   “Whole Home Audio” can not be a segregated network.

Precisely

D
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To name this thread “Clarifications” is a joke, I am more confused, angry and sad than I was before reading it. Sonos’ communication on this whole thing is beyond abysmal. This is like finding out that the woman you loved and envisioned living with until the end of days suddenly turning schizophrenic and psychotic. You cannot believe it, but she is incommunicable. You want it to not be true, and hope for the best, but you realize that you may have to end it.  


This thread cleared it up for me.

It is clear to me that everything they say is said very fuzzy, because they are trying to make you wonder IF, they might do something different from what they said at first.

It is clear to me that unless something is speficically adressed, you should expect the worst.

When people and companies are not very clear in their communication it is almost always because they are trying to tell you something they know you wont like, and therefor try to beat round the bush instead of getting to the point.

D
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Kumar

I agree and understand BUT Sonos is not flavour of the month for me right now

As i said I wont be buying anything Sonos from now on .

If i could resell my existing kit now i would but second hand kit is worthless now .

I have other connected devices BUT this has enlightened  me about ANY internet connected device 

So…  i will just buy the cheapest kit from now on rather than “high” end kit “

Why waste good hard earned money ….

I agree, the cheaper gear will also be obsoleted, but atleast the monetary sting will be a lot smaller.

 

How sad, as this will mean that we will truly be a “buy and discard” society with cheap units that will not last as long because of the price, and be scrapped.


But then again...We already kind of are, with sonos, the only difference between them and the others is that they are expensive, and the others are cheap.

The security conscientious like me will have a hard time finding gear that does not have always-on spy microphones in them.

C
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The Brand is dead. Worst strategic mistake made by a growth tech.

...

One can only hope that the cash hungry board, through their lack of care for loyal customers will be hit hard where it hurts in their dividends and share price. Because this is the only way these types will learn.

I couldn’t agree more.  I’m actually hoping SONOS does go bankrupt, because it would let Denon, Yamaha and every other company offering whole house audio to think twice (if not ten times) about discontinuing support, or offering a REAL discount (e.g. 75%) for upgrading devices.

M
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From what i have seen, the electronics inside the IKEA Symfonisk is exactly the same as inside the Play 1, with the only difference being that the Symfonisk has 256Mbyte instead of 64Mbyte

The Symfonisk is essentially identical to a play 1 inside, apparently.

 

Yes, the Symfonisk is the same PCB but with added ram and rom

Should be an easy retrofit when the Play 1 is obsoleted in a couple of years….If they have not changed the PCB in the Symfonisk or stopped selling it.

If you think about a Symfonisk is more functional than a play 1.. when Sonos brick your Symfonisk in a few years you can at least continue to use it as a shelf. 

You do know that they put a kill switch on the rear bracket don’t you?  When Spence approves a particular software update, it falls off the wall…  Though he may not be around to approve it.

But who wants the aesthetically challenged IKEA products?

This is the problem I am having in researching a alternative to SONOS.  I like the way my products look.  Most of what I am seeing and either just plain ugly or they are too much over the top for my taste.  I like the simplicity of the design I have now.  The Amazon Echos come closest in that department in my opinion.  But they don’t have a equivalent to a “sonos connect” right?

I
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Share price continue to fall - $15.04 last Tuesday to $13.62 now - a fall of 9.5% since the first announcement re legacy products.

 

W
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What really annoys me when i search about the backlash, is that clearly some PR person from Sonos has tried to make it seem the most upsetting aspect customers have is that new and old will not work together in a single system or the new cant have s/w upgrades, and oops let it be known that yes they can now do something about that so all is ok.

 

WELL THAT IS NOT WHAT IS ANNOYING ME AT ALL, OR IT THINK THE MAJORITY OF YOUR NOW EX LOYAL CUSTOMERS

 

Its the fact the 15 Sonos devices i have that Sonos labels as legacy ( I label as dam expensive speakers now worthless)  are NOT going to be software upgraded IN THE FUTURE to work with my on line streaming accounts such as Deezer, meaning they are useless to me once AND WHILST sonos suddenly claims Deezer will not work anymore with my Sonos kit, due to Sonos lazy ass, greedy, customer bashing, brand damaging  policy does not change.

 

Stop trying to spin your self away FROM THE FACT you have just written off 100,000s of customers investment in your product by suggesting we are upset about something as small as “legacy not working with New” on a single system, its the fact you are not s/w updating older products to work with the services we bought our product to work with,as i would not ever now buy any of your new kit from now on ever ever again.

This. So much this.

D
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This is the problem I am having in researching a alternative to SONOS.  I like the way my products look.  Most of what I am seeing and either just plain ugly or they are too much over the top for my taste.  I like the simplicity of the design I have now.  The Amazon Echos come closest in that department in my opinion.  But they don’t have a equivalent to a “sonos connect” right?

Denon Heos is not that different in design i think.

I am leaning toward replacing the 5 i have with a Heos 5 when my “modern” products stop working and i need to seperate the 5 from the rest to keep them updated.

Only problem is...When is Denon then going to obsolete my heos speaker

 

Maybe the best option is to just accept that every speaker will be obsoleted, be it cheap or expensive, and act accordingly and only buy the cheap speakers.

Still means that i need to replace them more often than is really needed from a hardware perspective, but the price will be a lot cheaper atleast.

I for one, am FINISHED, paying premium prices for speakers that needs scrapping 5 years down the road.

U
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ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay 

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech. 

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

G
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Sat here listening to my Sonos now….

Thinking about what could have been… as opposed to what had come to pass…

Such wasteful behaviour

Damaging the environment, the customers and the brand

J
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If

 

 

.  The Amazon Echos come closest in that department in my opinion.  But they don’t have a equivalent to a “sonos connect” right?

Amazon has Echo Link - which is a Connect/Port like device with digital in/out. I've never used it, reviews are so/so.

S

ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay 

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes.


Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

P
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ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay 

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech. 

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes
Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

They could call it ‘boost’ or ‘bridge’

D
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ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay 

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech. 

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame


Will the chromecast speaker groups be sync’ed ?

 

This is what was so great about sonos, you could just add another speaker and it would sync up perfectly.

G
Userlevel 6
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ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay 

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech. 

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame


Will the chromecast speaker groups be sync’ed ?

 

This is what was so great about sonos, you could just add another speaker and it would sync up perfectly.

You can certainly group google speakers for stereo etc

S

ok, so he

 

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes
Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future

They could call it ‘boost’ or ‘bridge’

 

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes
Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

They could call it ‘boost’ or ‘bridge’

I think the ‘Saviour’ might be more apt!!

D
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LOTS of sonos play 5’s for sale the Danish second hand market pages. Strangely there has been a massive boost in play 5’s for sale since about January 21.

 

Most dont say anything about the discontinuation and still try to get pretty high prices but a few has mentioned the obsolete program.

 

One seller writes directly

Please stop bidding like this is a defective product, It’s not defective, it will just not receive new features after may 2020.

 

Which is offcourse also a lie, as no updates will pretty soon make it “defective” because the core functions will stop working when streaming providers change something in their streams.

 

Also quite a lot of “I have decided to sell my entire Sonos setup”, some even only have modern devices for sale.

 

Seems like a lot of people are “abandoning ship” while there are still a bit of money to be had on the second hand market.

J
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This is the problem I am having in researching a alternative to SONOS.  I like the way my products look.  Most of what I am seeing and either just plain ugly or they are too much over the top for my taste.  I like the simplicity of the design I have now.  The Amazon Echos come closest in that department in my opinion.  But they don’t have a equivalent to a “sonos connect” right?

Denon Heos is not that different in design i think.

I am leaning toward replacing the 5 i have with a Heos 5 when my “modern” products stop working and i need to seperate the 5 from the rest to keep them updated.

Only problem is...When is Denon then going to obsolete my heos speaker

 

Maybe the best option is to just accept that every speaker will be obsoleted, be it cheap or expensive, and act accordingly and only buy the cheap speakers.

Still means that i need to replace them more often than is really needed from a hardware perspective, but the price will be a lot cheaper atleast.

I for one, am FINISHED, paying premium prices for speakers that needs scrapping 5 years down the road.

It looks like it could make sense to not go all in on one proprietary product line - and then, even when following standards and buying only such things that could be replaced by similar things from other vendors - then still expect to replace it all from time to time, as this is the plague of industrialism: we must sell, and sell more, and grow the business and sell even more. For this to happen, technologies need to be phased out and others phased in, all the time.

The patent system works on these conditions and often the next wave of tech is ready to be rolled out when some major patents are about to run out - look at cassette tapes, video tapes, CDs, laser discs, DVDs, mini disks, and a lot more - things that did have a high sales volume but were replaced with others.

In these modern times the product is often a service - maybe your Sonos device is nice and functional but what distinguishes it from the competition is the software and their updates, the availability of streaming services and the ease with which you can start using them, and so on. Probably you could imagine running the whole set of Sonos services on one of the competitors’ hardware, and it wouldn’t even take too much effort to make it happen.

When Denon and sister brands cannot sell enough Heos devices, or when they can see more money in moving on to the next version or a completely different technology, they will probably do it. It is unlikely that they will continue forever, and how long would be reasonable if not forever - 10 years? 20? 50? Which end to it would be acceptable? There would always be some that would get problems from a discontinued product line.

I have now, after experimenting with a Yamaha MusicCast device and finding it more or less impossible to use (as the app doesn’t work), just bought a Denon receiver with Heos and Airport 2 and a lot of other features, all for a price lower than what Sonos wants for a trade-in AMP. And people claim that the Denon has a good sound and that it can group its 7.2 channels as a 5.1 + a 2.1 zone (or something like that), to be controlled individually through Heos, meaning that this in fact corresponds for me to two AMPs.

Personally, I believe in such a device to be valuable over a long period, even if Heos should end its life - in that case some other technology can be added to one of the ports and it can still control the attached speakers and whatever else is connected to it.

I plan to add the Sonos ZP90 to it as well, since I like the mobile user interface and the Windows app, and nothing prevents me from mixing technologies this way. For additional rooms I will consider carefully what to buy, so that it will not all become junk if offered technologies should change.

“This is a chance now to come up with a system that doesn’t cause massive planetary damage in exchange for disposable stuff,” Proctor said. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8dpn/sonos-makes-it-clear-you-no-longer-own-the-things-you-buy)
B
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ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay 

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech. 

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

I’ve often wondered why Sonos don’t produce the option of “control boxes” which would do all the processing for audio formats before transmitting audio to each speaker. They could even do one with  multiple HDMI inputs……….like so many of their competitors now offer.

R
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Incidentally - SONOS share price down almost 3% again today in the first 90 minutes after the market opened,  Down almost 10% in the last 5 days.  I see it going further and it has gathered pace each day.

 

 

now down almost 4% today

J
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Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

There is software already that can do this, aggregating Sonos, airplay, upnp and others so that you have a single control point and features not offered natively. There's some compromise though and probably not what most Sonos customers want. But it would be interesting to see if more products come to market.

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