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.

Hi @Kh0annguyen 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thanks for your feedback - I’ve tagged this topic as a feature request and it will be seen by the development team (though you can assume it’s been suggested before).

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)

ah. This Community Post answers my question.

I don’t think there really are enough similarities between pairing in WiFi  and pairing in bluetooth to conclude that there is little different in development between the two.  I could be wrong, but I don’t the protocols of the two technologies are that similar.

As you found out, it’s more of a physics restriction and not at all a secret.

In my case WiFi only for the Roam has been a good thing given the (frustrating) lack of bluetooth stereo pairing. I was able to solve this with a travel router set to my home WiFi configuration.  I even was able to use a universal WiFi adapter connected to the travel router and pull in my phone’s hotspot and use that for beach/picnic time goodness. Did need to bring a battery pack though to power the router and adapter.

Remote Stereo sound FTW!!!!!

I was just about to press “buy”, to add two Sonos roams to my collection, but then I read this thread. I’d assumed Daisy chaining multiple roams via Bluetooth would be a given, considering it’s common in competitors like UE. It would be great if Sonos could say if this is, or is not coming. If it is, when…..? 

There are dual-audio streaming BT transmitters on the market, like this example:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07J58KY3X

…such devices will ‘pair’ to two BT speakers and play the streaming BT audio in sync. I’ve tried this and they do seem to work okay - handy to play to two Moves or Roams at a remote location …and the device shown in the link above also has a built-in rechargeable battery that will last all day.

Hi Ken, appreciate the response. I’ll have a look into that. I think the main interest is when I go away with friends and 2 or more people just so happen to have a Roam with them, we can connect them up on say, the beach or out and about, without having to pre-plan it. But that is useful to know none the less. Much appreciated. 

@inmaterichard,
I sometimes carry a MiFi device with me instead - see attached. They can vary in price depending if you want a 4G or a 5G LTE connection. 4G works fine, but I recently switched to 5G (Amazon Summer Sale ).

These devices seem to work well when out and about here in the U.K. (I’m using EE mobile network). You can of course simply use a mobile ‘hotspot’ instead if you prefer, but if using a phone’s hotspot, then a second phone is needed as a controller, so I prefer to use MiFi.

Anyhow I have added the MiFi’s WiFi network (MobileLink-2G or 5G in my case) to my two Roams and that means all will connect/run on its WiFi signal with my iPhone connected too as their controller. 

That all means I can play music stored on my phone (over Airplay), or even stream music from online services (Spotify etc.) allegedly to upto 32 speakers paired and/or grouped (ooeerrr)!! .. I only ever use two Sonos speakers of course when travelling, but it works really well, I find …and it is a great alternative to ‘Bluetooth’ audio whilst out and about with Roams (or Sonos Moves).

So that’s another option to perhaps consider if wanting to play to multiple Roams/Moves, either ‘paired’ or ‘grouped’, outdoors.

Connecting multiple devices (eg. speakers) is a feature of Bluetooth 5.0

Bluetooth 5.0 announced 16th of June 2016

Dual Audio

Bluetooth 5.0 also enables a new feature that allows you to play audio on two connected devices at the same time. In other words, you could have two pairs of wireless headphones connected to your phone, and them stream audio to both of them at once, all via standard Bluetooth. Or you could play audio on two different speakers in different rooms. You could even stream two different audio sources to two different audio devices at the same time, so two people could be listening to two different pieces of music, but streaming from the same phone.

I'm guessing this feature still doesn't exist? Madness that my £10 Anker speaker can do this flawlessly. 

How well does your Anker speaker communicate with other speakers when in WiFi mode?

Horses (and electronics) for courses. Just because one speaker is Bluetooth and has a feature doesn’t mean that all speakers that have Bluetooth have the same feature set. If that were the case, why bother making other speakers, the ‘one’ with all the features has already been made.

Sonos makes a network speaker that also allows Bluetooth, and has the capability to pass that Bluetooth connection to other WiFi connected speakers. They’ve chosen the electronics to match that function. What they haven’t done is make a clone of the Anker and the features of a merely Bluetooth speaker. 

You have completely missed the point and are arguing against a beneficial feature. Looking at how many topics have raised a topic about this subject clearly a lot of people want this. I'd be double the price of the Anker for the Sonos to have this built in. Then I'd buy another Sonos to pair. Sounds like a win win for Sonos. 

Most folk with Sonos systems at home can group/pair their roams anyway and play Bluetooth audio to two or more devices… it’s only when away from the Home WiFi this would be useful and most people tend to only carry the one speaker when out and about in most cases… plus there are portable Bluetooth transmitter devices with dual audio transmitters anyway to play to two or more devices without Sonos needing to do anything. So I don’t see this feature as being that beneficial, all things considered compared to the other features that the Roam offers…

• Waterproof 
• Auto-Trueplay 
• Apple Airplay 
• Wireless Audio
• Sound Swap
• Bluetooth pass-through to wireless Sonos products
• Stereo pairing & grouping too.
• 10 hour battery life
• Built-in mic with voice assistant (Alexa/Google)
• Available in Black/White colours
• Wireless Qi charging

I would like to play sound from my Peloton bike (an android device) to my pair of Roam speakers in stereo.  The speakers work brilliantly as a stereo pair over wifi but when I try to connect from the Peloton I can only connect via Bluetooth and then it will only connect to one of the two Roam speakers at a time.

Please Sonos can you add stereo pairing over Bluetooth to the Roam speakers. It would be a great feature and as the Peloton community continues to grow you will add more potential customers as the experience would be so much better than using the inbuilt Peloton Speaker.

You could perhaps simply group the two speakers, if you need the audio to play on both Roams - it just means a loss of channel separation, but it’s clearly better than playing on just the one device only. This is assuming you have a WiFi signal that the devices can access in addition to the Bluetooth connection.

Many thanks for the reply and info.  How would I group the two speakers over Bluetooth?  Would they be playing in stereo?