Sonos is working on products in four new categories; first released in 2023 – Sound and Vision – News

We have been very satisfied Sonos users for years. It depends on our home automation with Homey. Depending on the day of the week and our presence and time, different playlists or radio streams are started. I think the pinnacle of luxury is in sync everywhere. From my terrace to the bathroom and bedroom.

Is there nothing more to wish for? Of course. My top 5:

1. It would be nice if some parts were a little cheaper. The Sonos Port (the successor to the Connect) costs 450 euros. In fact, this is a Sonos player without a speaker. When you consider that the Sonos One SL costs around 200 euros, I have a serious feeling that I am terribly relieved. Their profit data backs this up too. With a loss of $64 million in Q1 and then finishing the year on a high with a profit of $67 million, then your margins are going to be good.

2. it would be nice if a mid-range player returned. By now everyone knows Sonos One. The Sonos Five is the big boss with a price to match. Froegah you had Play:3, but it’s been out of use for a long time and Sonos isn’t offering anything new. We now have a stereo pair of 2 Play:3s in our living room. If 1 piece of that goes, then I really have no alternative. And Sonos One doesn’t take up that space, even in a stereo pair.

3. some decent in-app troubleshooting would be really nice. There is almost nothing in the mobile app, and the Windows / MacOS apps are more or less at their end of life. And that’s while Sonos itself adheres to a separate technology with its own network (if you connect one to your LAN) with STP enabled throughout. This can, under certain circumstances, cause serious problems. We have suffered from it several times.

4. Clarity on generations and technology would also be nice. All “modern” Sonos products support 2.4Ghz AND 5Ghz. But the old ones don’t. We had a setup with several Ikea Symphonisk boxes which at some point (with 4 Ikea boxes and 3 Play:3) could no longer be stabilized. The result: massive radio stuttering and massive WIFI problems. Several times I’ve been on the verge of kicking out Sonos. However, I didn’t for one simple reason: the integration with our home automation. It is really dear to me. So what did we do? All the “old” 2.4GHz speakers thrown away and bought new that do 5GHz. Since then, Sonos has been great again and the network has been stable again. But in interacting with Sonos support during these weeks of troubleshooting (we spent almost 2 months on this) it wasn’t all clear and in the end they didn’t want to confirm the conclusion of 2.4ghz as the official fix, when it was. Also, the Sonos helpdesk’s network knowledge was sometimes very poor. I can imagine frontline doesn’t have all the knowledge and skills, but if I’m advised to neuter my WIFI network (by Ubiquiti) by around 90% because Sonos isn’t working, then some things are wrong. If you’re that bad at playing games with others, maybe you should take a closer look at your technology.

5. Support for hi-res FLAC and others would be nice. I seriously have a lot of digital audio. Many of them are my old CDs that have been digitized to FLAC, but also many new albums that have been purchased in hi-res audio. Sonos high-resolution audio (FLAC) support is fairly limited at the moment.

There is therefore still a lot to do in the current portfolio and service delivery. That said, we now have almost everything from Sonos running on 5Ghz and it works (now again) like a spear. Sound quality is also excellent. Sonos is often abused, especially by audiophiles. The sound quality would suck et cetera. Well, I think the average Sonos players sound great. Is it high-end audio? No, but it’s certainly not as bad as many “nitpickers” would have you believe. Sound quality is excellent for everyday use. So is the overall quality of the players. As mentioned, we are very satisfied users.