re: SONOS speaker owners..how much freedom do you have? UPDATE 2 PAGE 11

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Oak Hill, VA

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come on tigerwise. clearly instructions aren't the only thing you don't read.

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CAD's Garage

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Ok, a little over a month in and I'm ready to list a few of the positives & negatives associated with SONOS that i've noticed at this time:

1. you cannot 'stereo pair' disparate speakers. you can only create a stereo pair with 2 play:1s, 2 play:3s or 2 play:5s. i wanted to test this feature out with a play3 and a play1 but you can't. Just an FYI.

2. play:1s sound REALLY good. i feel like the cylinder approach does a better job of filling the surrounding area than the focused front speaker on the play:3. jury is still out at this time on how the sound quality is on a set of play:3s in stereo vs a set of play:1s in stereo but will update on that later. it would be much cheaper for me to find out 2 play1s will fill up a room instead of 2 play3s. i gotta have stereo!

3. monoprice has a $6 mount for play:3s in both white and black which is the bomb. as good as the $40+ mounts at amazon and other places.

4. "grouping" is a half-implemented feature. you have no ability to retain/name groups of speakers for future use. i'm very disappointed in this as you either have to select 'party mode' each time you want to listen to music and group them all or manually select your target speakers each and every time you fire up your sonos app.

5. speaking of 'sonos app' i thought there was a connect-web feature that would allow me to control the music remotely. because google music has issues with listening on multiple devices, i run into trouble leaving the house with the sonos still playing when i try to listen to google music in my car because 'its already playing on another device'. that sucks. also i would like to set the mood on my sonos system on my way home or change music for the SO remotely but there's no cloud/web-interface for this. you have to be on WiFi or nada. this is criminal that remote access isn't available in 2017 for such an expensive system.

6. also if the app is smart enough to integrate with the lockscreen on my phone, i would expect an option to attenuate the volume, mute or pause the music when a phone call is incoming. nope. you have to go find a speaker & hit the play/pause button on it if you're jamming out and you get a phone call. also a very basic feature that i can't believe they don't have.

7. minor gripe; if you have grouped speakers you can't turn the volume up on one of them and have that turn the volume up for the entire group. you gotta go hunt your phone down and use the app to do that or just walk around to each speaker raising or lower the volume. this is annoying with certain music that i'm listening to where one track is louder/softer than the rest and i can't turn everything down from the speaker next to me but have to go hunt my phone down.


i'm not trying to over or under sell this product, just trying to provide a list of things it would be helpful for new owners to know if they are considering purchasing sonos. tigerwise is correct in the apple approach they are taking. they seem to be 'you get these 8 features, only these 8 features and nothing but these 8 features' and are very slow (at least reading the forums) to roll out anything new.

your stupid

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It should be in your sonos config settings somewhere. Can't do it right now cause I'm not on my home wifi where the speakers are at.

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i should clarify.

1. you can't name groups, correct? you can name the invidual speakers (girls room 1 and girls room 2) but i want to give that group a name not the 'girls 1 and girls 2' defeault that it gives them.

2. you can't create overlapping groups using speakers and select the one you want to use without first ungrouping them then changing them back later on. it doesn't retain the groups you've created for shite.


3. you should be able to turn on 'party mode' (so every speaker in your house is grouped) then when the party is over, your previous groups are retained. unless i'm missing something you cant do this and lose all your groups and have to set them all back up again later.

4. as you pointed out, anytime the power goes out, you have to set up all your groups again.


all of this could be eliminated with a tiny piece of code that lives on each of your speakers that remembers where they were last grouped or if sonos would simply add a cloud feature to store this.


that's what i mean by half-baked feature.

eta again, i'm not trying to "hate" or "love" on sonos but to accurately describe things that i consider to be fairly common features someone looking into buying these might assume are built into the product and may or may not be a dealbreaker.