Pairing a Play:1 with the new Sonos One

so disappointing.
I own a Play:1 and with the ability to pair it with a Sonos One it wouldn't only improve sound quality but would also add the additional feature of voice control. So, it would make an existing product better. This isn't the case when pairing two Sonos One.
So, the priority should be on making it possible to pair Sonos One and Play: 1. that this was not done for "aesthetic" reasons makes me doubt the quality of the decision-making processes in that company.
If you believe it or not. This (and Spotify support) feature would make be buy that speaker. Otherwise, I'll stick with the old play: 1.

We just purchased the Play One and didn’t realize we wouldn’t be able to pair this with our current Sonos products. For some of us to the design or color differences do not matter, we are having a house built and these are being mounted in the ceiling and out of sight. I hope they enable this feature.

Er, trueplay demonstrates thst a spot of DSP can radically alter sound quality. Why can't trueplay be i proved so you can link the different speaker models as a stereo pair? I think this is more marketing, than technical on Sonos’ part.

I think Sonos have simply mis-judged what their users wanted with Alexa. I am a little surprised that they've been quite so wide of the mark.

I have some sympathy in that this is a very fast moving market, and that with the likes of Google and Amazon adding multi-room music to their vice-enabled speakers they needed to somehow be seen as active in this space or risk losing a lot of customers based on their now more popular Play speaker range and popularity of streaming on these speakers.

However, a dash of common sense should have asked the question quite early on around why would you want a pair of Alexa enabled speakers in the same room in relatively close proximity? And then based on that, it surely would have made more sense to make the new Sonos One look the same as a Play:1 and allow pairing... You could then perhaps price drop the Play:1 and if the One proves popular, expend the concept of adding Alexa enabled versions throughout the range.

When Amazon properly sort out multi-room Alexa, Sonos then have something you can't currently do with Echo's which is create Stereo pairs, or make your Sonos One/Three/Five and Alexa part of a surround system. You then have a convincing answer to the Echo. A single Sonos Alexa enabled device offers better quality across a range of budgets and then can be added to with non-Alexa speakers in the same room to create a stereo pair or whole surround system, and that can then be done in multiple rooms too.

If you then make it compatible with more than one Voice assistant, the case just gets stronger.

The current scenario though seems limiting to existing owners and will only cause new ones to question why they have to have multiple voice enabled speakers just to turn it off on all but one of them.

Just to add my voice as 'another' disappointed Sonos owner, bought a Sonos One with the expectation of pairing it with one of my Play 1s and moving my Amazon dot to another room with a Sonos setup. No ability to pair with a Play 1 is hugely disappointing, As pointed out endlessly elsewhere why would you want two Alexa enabled speakers in the same room? Sonos One now gathering dust waiting for Sonos to catch up to their customer expectations. I would say in general the Alexa experience, certainly though the dot, is pretty poor on Sonos with the TuneIn radio service being hopeless on BBC streams and no ability to choose another radio service, lack of Apple music service, no ability to play from your own library and a pretty hit or miss ability for the dot to actually make the chosen room play even though it verbally acknowledges the command correctly. Feels pretty 'beta' still to me at the moment and more of a gimmick that of any real world use.

What's the ETA on this fix? A little frustrating telling Alexa to play music and THEN still having to just got to the app to control the volume on the other speakers. Sorta defeats the purpose.

Nobody has even said it was coming, never mind when. The last communication on the issue was this tweet from the Sonos CEO:

https://twitter.com/Patrick_Spence/status/922953675756187656

Adding my agreement to this topic for CEO Patrick Spence. I just read your tweat, and as someone who delightedly bought three Ones to pair in three of my rooms with the Sonos surround set ups without realizing that they cannot be swapped for one of my Play 1’s on a pair... Of course we would expect these to be able to pair with a Play 1 despite the slight difference in appearance! It is ridiculous to think anyone would want two Alexa devices in one room. It isn’t needed and as some who has had my Echos too close to each other, it confuses Alexa.
I am glad Sonos is integrating with Alexa, but Sono’s really needs to give those of us with existing Play 1 systems the ability to pair new Ones with our Play 1s. I was starting with 3 but I was going to pair with all of my Play 1’s in all my rooms. What, does Patrick Spence expect someone like me who has them in 8 rooms to throw out all of my Play 1’s and replace them all with One’s. That is insane. Give those if use with existing systems (mine all bought last year) the choice as to whether we care about the slight visual difference and the choice as to whether we would like to pair with our existing Play 1’s.
I already have Echos in all of my rooms, so the 3 One’s I just bought are going to be returned until they can pair with a Play 1.

Marcus,

Did you pair (make them stereo speakers) or group (make them play the same streams)?

Hi, it is a real stereopair. One speaker is no more visible in the Sonos App after pairing. Its like you pair two Play:1. It is shown as L+R in Sonos room settings.

I just use the regular commands for creating a stereo pair. I think it could work with a Play:5 gen1 and gen2 also but i´m not sure what happens if you try to pair a Play:5 and a Play:1.

HOLY COW IT WORKED. And Pink Floyd's Money sounds AWESOME with such a wide sound stage. I would imagine that it doesn't survive a reboot, though.

And yeah, it can also create a pair between a Sonos One and Play:5 (I have a Gen1 Play:5)... don't think I'd recommend such a pairing, but it's possible with this app.

Edit to add: After listening for a bit, if I turn the bass up, it's easy to tell that the Sonos One has a bit more "thump" to its low end over the Play:1... but I'm happy with the ability to create the pair, even if it's not official. 🙂

I don’t yet have any play ones but I find the SonoSequencr app pretty useful for making macros to quickly do all kinds of stuff.

Now need to find a way to add a play 1/one combo to a 5.1 setup. This pairing via a 3rd party app has confirmed however that it is not (on the surface at least) a technical issue but a commercial one.

I don’t yet have any play ones but I find the SonoSequencr app pretty useful for making macros to quickly do all kinds of stuff.

Now need to find a way to add a play 1/one combo to a 5.1 setup. This pairing via a 3rd party app has confirmed however that it is not (on the surface at least) a technical issue but a commercial one.
Very interesting/useful. But it would be also good to know any downsides. Is there any chance of bricking Sonos kit this way?

I’d say that’s unlikely, but can’t say for sure.

What Marcus has demonstrated is that the stereo pair compatibility checking is done at the controller, which is what I’d inferred from his earlier information. Since he wrote the controller, he doesn’t do the check.

Stereo pairing by Sonos is actually easier than grouping. Once you have two synchronised speakers (hard), you just tell each one to play a single channel (easy).

However, for Sonos to do this properly with a 1 and a ONE, they will have to compensate for the acoustic differences using signal processing. This is not dissimilar to TruePlay.