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Comment by adkadskhj | Hacker News Reader

Sonos have had me curious for a while. I often use in-home small bluetooth speakers and frankly i'm happy enough with them - i just want more of them, with more power.

So for louder, phone connected speakers would you still recommend Sonos? Ie i'm not sure i need the idea of multiple rooms playing the same thing. I'd love it, but my wife wouldn't hah. However i do want (decent) quality speakers in all rooms that i can play music on, and i'm largely satisfied with the bluetooth-phone experience. I'm just not satisfied with my tiny bluetooth speaker quality or sound level.

Any opinion of if i should look into Sonos? Or would cheaper bluetooth speakers fit better?

(edit: Sidenote, the voice assistant option is a downside for me. Otherwise i'd probably own a few Apple HomePods)

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Sonos works well and I love it generally, but I’ve been really disappointed with their business practices the last few years. The S1->S2 debacle really shook my confidence and reminded me that I’m tying up a very expensive speaker with cheap digital services that could disappear or be obsoleted at literally any moment with little notice.

Their whole recycling/permanently destroying speakers debacle was also quite annoying.

If you go into expecting the third year and beyond of service to be bonus and that you’re the product not the customer, it’s a great fit for your needs.

I prefer sonos for my own reasons. Bluetooth sucks power from my phone. Sonos connects over wifi and the phone isn’t involved in the streaming. I can remote control sonos from the spotify windows app or webapp on my laptop. Also the multi-speaker functionality is great. I don’t use it often, but if doing work around the house it’s nice to hear the audio stream just continue. Not a gamechanger itself though.

I'm personally happy with Bose Soundlink speakers for Bluetooth. They're not the cheapest, but they have good sound quality.

If I were going to go for a wifi speaker, though, I'd seriously look at Bluesound's product line. They're a Sonos competitor and they're not nearly as well known, but they're part of the same little group that owns NAD Electronics and PSB Speakers and use amplifiers and acoustics from those sister companies. If you're an audio nerd (or even if you're not), that's a pretty good pedigree. AFAIK Bluesound products work with various voice assistants, but don't build them in.

(Edited to add: I don't own a Bluesound device, but I do own a NAD T758 receiver, which uses an earlier version of BluOS for its streaming/wifi capabilities and it's pretty solid.)

I, personally, am moving to Wi-Fi speakers because the audio quality and connection consistency have been considerably better than Bluetooth, both with my Sonos Beam and JBL Link Portable.

If you want the fluidity of Sonos without the voice assistant, check out the Sonos One SL - it's the Sonos One without the microphone and voice assistant, and is $20 cheaper because of it. There's also the IKEA Symfonisk, which is basically a bookshelf speaker variant of the One SL, from what I've read.

I have three of their little speakers and a sound bar and I’m pretty happy. No connecting/disconnecting bluetooth, no walking out of range and the sound getting choppy, I can select which speaker I want to play directly from spotify or open the app and play multiple rooms at once. Not sure how well it works (or if it even can) as a direct bluetooth speaker. I think it’s more like a little music server and your phone is just the remote.

I had wanted the 5, but it turns out the One is vastly more powerful than I need. The volume has never been above 1/3rd. They are really good.

The creepiness factor is a significant problem but I hope to beat it with network changes and send them some feedback. It certainly makes me reconsider further purchases.

I've read the article and as far as I understand they use my location and data all around my music listening. (I don't have voice enabled)

To me that's not a dealbreaker, it may be to you.

I've got a few Sonos speakers, and all around they sound great, so I can only recommend them! I've also never had any troubleshooting to do with them.

I do wonder if they actually take your location.

I know in iOS a bunch of non-obvious APIs are attached to location permissions. Including access to your current WiFi network name, which would be used by Sonos to configure your speaker during setup.

Yep. This is a key factor. To discover new devices, Sonos uses a wireless scan. That requires location permission, because knowing the MAC of a nearby AP can be easily turned into location. (Yes, in theory Sonos could do device discovery through some other method, but this is the one they chose.)

Meaning every device is sharing its location? I'm confused, please clarify.

Not quite. But if you know the MAC address of nearby access points, there are multiple location services that can turn that into a lat/Lon location (e.g. Skyhook [1]). Indeed iOS/Android does this to estimate phone location without GPS.

Of course this requires someone to have already uploaded the estimated location of the access point. But loads of apps and OSs do that all the time.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless

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