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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there would be some kind of overhaul in patents. Why was a patent for "The technology in question relates to the ability to connect speakers in groups and control their volume." ever granted? That seems like the very first thing you would do when connecting two speakers. Unless this is some kind of ai that tracks where you are and dynamically changes volumes to maintain a surround sound feel or something where is the novelty at?

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Came here to say the same thing. I'm the last fan of Google but "the ability to connect speakers in groups and control their volume" is obvious to conceive of and implement to any engineer with sufficient expertise in the field.

It's not obvious at all, for wireless speakers, especially in complex multi-room setups. If it were obvious and easy, then everyone's wireless audio products would handle this as well as Sonos does. But they don't. I bought two Sonos One SLs and had them set up as a stereo pair that my Apple TV could talk to almost instantly. Then recently I got a Sonos Beam soundbar and wanted to use my One SLs as surround speakers. I expected a long, painful setup similar to what I've experienced with competing products. Instead it was seamless, easy, and delightful, and I haven't had to touch or mess with the setup at all since.

There are also a lot of details like how to handle time delays with a large set of wireless speakers so that sound is synced with a TV picture, comparative volume adjustments for a given acoustic, etc.

Did you read the patents or any other reporting on the patents or this case? For instance:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/in-a-flashpoint-for-...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-loses-sonos-p...

While the implementation of synchronization is not obvious, the concept of doing it is. They shouldn't be able to patent the entire concept of allowing multiple speaker volumes to be adjusted with a single slider (which is what everyone is complaining about), as the implementation of that is trivial.

Maybe that isn't what they've actually done though...maybe Google is keeping their synchronization stuff, but breaking the volume change since Sonos made the mistake of combining them in a single claim. That way Google can avoid violating that claim by not doing the volume part.

Latency was literally the first thing I considered and I haven’t done any audio work since the nineties.

Or to anyone who uses an old-fashioned audio receiver ("amp") with wired speakers. Turn the dial, both speakers change volume. Obviously what I want.

I have not read anything besides this article, though, so it's possible the patent is being misinterpreted here.

Sound engineers and technicians have been controlling speaker group volume for probably a century now. The Sonos patent is more than just an obvious invention. Otherwise the courts would’ve tossed it out.

I have zero faith in court's ability to see through techno-babble.

From the article, I gathered that the patent isn't on the idea of doing so but the specific implementation. In short, Google took the knowledge they gained from the internals of how the Sonos speakers worked and copied that directly. This is a bit different from, say a patent on a virtual shopping cart where it's more the idea than how it's implemented.

All patents are on the specific implementation, but patent attorneys work hard to ensure that the claims in the patent (the only part that matters) cover as broad an area as possible.

Yep, Google just blatantly copied Sonos engineering like some Chinese scammer and expects to get away with it.

Might be good to read the patents before posting this comment. The patents in the suit are far, far more detailed than Inc's throwaway one-line description in this article. Sonos' tech here also involves seamless automatic wireless setup and automatically assessing relative speaker volume for a given space, and all kinds of other things. If you've set up a group of Sonos speakers, versus any of the competitors, you know how much better their tech is.

It's not merely "ability to connect speakers in groups". Inc just did a terrible job here.

One the relevant patents [1] does just appear to be describing connecting speakers in a group.

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

If the patent didn't cover adjusting the volume for a group of speakers, why did Google have to disable it? While the patent portfolio did include other things, Google is being forced to disable the basic, obvious feature.

Google is not being forced to disable this feature, Google decided to. They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature like they did, after all.

> They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature

That's an assumption. You don't know how much Sonos was asking. In addition, companies can choose to not license a patent to their competitors.

No that's not the problem. Google already implemented the feature and made money of it. They do owe royalties to Sonos.

The patents did cover controlling volume across the group, but there was more to it (see the 5 patents linked elsewhere in this discussion).

I know there was "more to it", but this claim of the patent could have been invalidated. It seems like the court's interpretation is that Sonos owns the entire process of grouping speakers and changing the volume for that group, which is a very obvious claim.

I've had to set up Sonos equipment in our corporate network (because President gonna President) and frankly I wasn't that impressed. I imagine it works a lot better for home users, but here I had to downgrade WPA3 to WPA2 to get them to see each other on the network, you have to use an IGMP proxy if you want a client to be able to connect from a different VLAN, and things get very confused if you have two different versions set up (because older hardware isn't supported on the newer versions).

Those all sound like things that would be rarely encountered in a typical home installation.

I have a few older Sonos One speakers (the OG version) and the setup was trivial for our use case (background music in kitchen, bedroom, and living room). At the time (~5 years ago), they were the clear market leader, both in audio quality and ease-of-use.

I did consider swapping them out for the first HomePod, but price put me off. Apple has since discontinued in favor of the Mini - I need to check them out and see if the audio quality is remotely comparable before making any change.

I agree with you about this part. I do general IT support and have had to set up one of my clients with a large number of Sonos speakers in their office. It was a pain and the tech doesn't seem to be as good of a match for corporate networks.

Has worked incredibly well in my home, though.

The synchronization of multiple zones is definitely non-trivial. Many years ago I had a few Apple Airport Expresses which had audio out. In theory you could use Airplay with these to do much the same thing as Sonos for a lot cheaper. In a one-bedroom apartment, we have 3 zones (bedroom, living room, kitchen) which are all close enough that there's a lot of opportunities to hear sound from 2 or 3 systems at the same time. With Apple it was never in sync. Small delays make the sound miserable. I finally bit the bullet and bought 3 Sonos units. They just work when it comes to the sync.

There are other aspects which made Sonos far superior to just using Apple's Airplay and iTunes, but those are not covered in the patents in question.

My assumption is that if getting 3 devices to stay in sync - with what I assume is UDP streams and WiFi latency hiccups - was easy or even somewhat difficult, Apple would have been able to solve it. But they couldn't. There must be some special sauce here that Sonos developed and patented.

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