Sonos will enter a new market next year with a product series, possibly headphones

I can still remember the start of Sonos in the Netherlands. It started at Hobo Hifi in Arnhem and Haarlem (where I worked at the time) with a ZP-80 and a ZP-100. Spotify did not yet exist and, for example, you could get Napster working via a detour. Sonos was mainly linked to a NAS, mainly from Buffalo, for streaming its own digital music library. Operating with your telephone was not yet possible, but via the PC with its own software, or with Sonos’ own remote with screen and a rotary wheel for operation (CR-100). A smaller remote with touchscreen (CR-200) followed later, but by then many people already had a smartphone to operate Sonos. Many other brands have tried to compete with Sonos during that time, resulting in a proliferation of streaming products that came and quietly left the scene through the back door. Linksys by Cisco is a good example, they were supposed to improve Sonos for a while, but had to fade away with their tail between their legs. The strength of Sonos was their own proprietary network which always worked for 99.9%, while the rest was messing around with WiFi and so you were always dependent on the quality of your own wireless network to make it work. A few years after the introduction of Sonso, the first ‘wireless’ speaker was released, the Sonos Play5, and at that time we at Sonos started pushing for wireless headphones within the Sonos network. So it took more than a decade before it finally (maybe) happen. In my opinion a miss, but better late than never!