I did end up going with Sonos and it wasn’t cheap. I wanted in wall speakers so I had to go with a powered amp for each zone. At $500/each, I’m at $2k just in amps. Pricey, but it does what I want, at least until the Echo came into our lives because telling your speaker to play a song while your hands are busy cooking dinner is amazing.
I’m waiting for the promised Sonos/Echo integration to be finalized. It will then be the perfect home audio solution.
Sonos sure ain’t cheap but it has been pretty rock solid for me over the past 4-5 years. I have 4 zones in my house and have never had any issues.
Integrating into other third party systems is not trivial, AirSonos kind of works but can be a bit dodgy. This is particularly annoying for audible books cause for whatever reason (cough echo) sonos had to drop audible support.
Regardless, highly recommend sonos, it is a very polished appliance.
btw, reading the early posts sure brought back memories, I developed the first windows wrapper for squeezebox many lifetimes ago it when it was called SliMP3 and even wrote a Windows server for SliMP3 in Visual cough Basic.
Unwrapped our Play 1 today. Setup was quick and simple. Works with our Apple Music and Amazon Music without a hitch. Very impressed with the sound quality.
Sonos has finally announced the Alexa support, including a new $199 Sonos One smart speaker, plus Echo Dot support. Details on their page: http://www.sonos.com/en-us/alexa-on-sonos
I have managed to get a free Dot with my Orbi and a $10 dot with the 4K HDR Fire TV I preordered, so I’ll be set.
Though I only need it in the second room because my family likes the Sonos because of its ease of use. In the TV room I can say 'Alexa, Connect Bluetooth" and the Echo Dot connects to my Denon receiver+Klipsch setup, which makes my otherwise glorious Sonos sound like an AM transistor radio. :)
Doesn’t have to be a Dot does it? Support page just says Alexa enabled device.
Yeah, any Alexa device. I have a batroom Echo that’s in voice range of my bedroom Sonos. :)
I’m wondering if this might make my Amazon Wand useful. It can’t play local music, but I wonder if it will take Sonos commands?
If you’ve already got an Alexa device, Amazon’s got the old model Play:1 and Play:5 for $50 and $100 off respectively via Alexa Deals.
Sonos supporting Alexa control is great, but they’re not all the way yet. Support for playing Spotify is not in yet, they’re saying “before the holidays”. Until that’s in, it’s not all that useful yet other than as a means to hit play/pause/skip.
Yeah, Amazon music works OK, but it’s a bit tricky with names. I had both my Sonos and bedroom Echo named “bedroom”. It didn’t like that, OK fine. I renamed the Sonos to “bedside”-- didn’t work, played on the Echo every time. Tried renaming the Echo to “Bed”, no go, still played on the Echo. I had to rename the Sonos to “Sonos”, then it worked.
I would not have bought a Sonos, it was a gift. Great sounding speaker, but I don’t like using its app. I setup an airplay daemon and mostly use that instead. Works OK, but there’s a fair bit of latency so not ideal.
For real? That sucks. I can already do all that via Yonomi.
So I finally got round to setting this up, and it’s really finicky. I only have one Sonos, named Living Room. For certain commands, worded a certain way, it works fine. For others, it either says it can only do that when music is playing, or it says it can’t find anything named “Living Room”. If I try to change the volume, it says “Living Room is not responding”. I’m going to try renaming it to Sonos, but I don’t have any other device names that would obviously conflict, and it seems unlikely to fix the volume changing issue.
Yeah, it’s very much still in beta. All kinds of weird quirks around naming devices, especially if it conflicts with the names of your Echo devices. I think that eventually it’ll be improved, though.
It still doesn’t work 100% even named “Sonos”. Not a huge deal as I usually just airplay to it anyway.
Oh, hey, the Spotify integration is now in. I can tell my Echo Dot “Alexa, play <name of band / album / song> in the kitchen” and it works, it’ll start playing on the Sonos speaker that I named “Kitchen”. Just make sure you set Spotify to the default Music Service, and beware having more than one device with the same name. I renamed my Dot in the kitchen to “Kitch” and that solved my problems.
I think I’m going to pick up a Sonos One on Black Friday discount to make the kitchen speaker, which will free up the Dot for another room and allow me to put a Sonos speaker in the living room. [EDIT] Or maybe not. I just read that the Sonos One doesn’t support Drop-In, and since I use the Dots in my house as an intercom, that’s a nope. Instead I guess I’ll just pick up another Sonos Play 1 and another Echo Dot.
I’d heard good things about Sonos from a mailroom guy who started talking to me after delivering some LPs I’d ordered and who turned out to have been on a major label for a couple of years in the 90s. The connectivity and features do sound cool.
But I was in a furniture boutique the other week and they had Sonos speakers in there, and they didn’t sound better than any other small wireless speakers. They’re essentially smart satellite speakers from a home theater system. Surely no connectivity is worth reducing one’s music system to that.
Why doesn’t Sonos partner with an actual speaker manufacturer to make some towers with woofers worthy of the name? Active speakers (i.e., with an amp built in) have advanced by leaps and bounds in the past 10 years. It shouldn’t be hard to engineer.
They’re pretty good sounding speakers, and certainly the best contained speaker with Alexa built-in you can buy. Do they compare to an amplifier, subwoofer, and two bookshelves connected to an Echo Dot? Obviously not. But they blow the Google Home and big Echo out of the water.
Supposedly the Sonos Play 5 has plenty of bass woofer action going. I’ve read several reviews saying that Play:5s have the oomph to satisfy any non-insane audiophile. I’ve also read that pairing a pair of Play 1s with a Sonos Sub is great. Of course all of these are very expensive solutions, and you’re definitely better off going non-Sonos if all you care about is audio quality / price ratio. The easy connectivity is really Sonos’ main selling point.
If Sonos wanted to make towers, they totally could. I just think they feel that market is well served.
As for me, I wish they’d improve the Playbar. Get it to support Dolby Atmos, DTS (anything!), and give it some HDMI ports and I think I’d be willing to spend the amount they’re asking for it.
I think its safe to say that Sonos has rested on its laurels a fair bit, and is now scrambling to stay relevant. When they first came out, and for a few years after, they were pretty much the only game in town (as a complete package), but they didn’t really innovate for a long time after that other than coming out with different form factors, and it has become harder and harder to justify the price premium.
We have a Play 5 and a Play 1. Sonos updates the speakers’ software often and recently improved the app. The Play 1 is in my wife’s office, so I can’t comment on that, but the Play 5, in our kitchen, is great. We have Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music subscriptions b/c we are trying them all to see which to stick with. It’s so easy to just go in the Sonos app, search for a song while on the Stations tab, and just start some music. Our Echo Dot is hooked up to it via Bluetooth and the quality of that as a partner device has been steadily working. Overall, I find the Sonos “just works” and takes the hassle out of listening to music.
Sonos has a new sound bar, the Beam. $400. I am not really happy with my current receiver set up and still haven’t ran rear speakers because I would need 25’ wires and would have a difficult time hiding them, so I am kind of considering this. Am I correct in thinking that a pair of Sonos:1s would work as rear speakers wirelessly?
The subwoofer at $700 makes me question if I want to go this route though.