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IIRC Sonos emerged as a tool to allow you to access all of your music, from different speakers throughout your house.

I might be glossing over some details but isn't this problem largely solved by other products almost everyone has now? Any cloud music service, a smart phone, and some bluetooth speakers?

In my entire social network, I know of one person who has all of his music stored locally and who cares about the quality of bluetooth vs wifi transmission, which seem to be the key reasons someone would want a Sonos solution.

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No. There are certain scenarios that Sonos still handles well, despite the app issues of the past year.

If I drop the needle on my Technics 1200 turntable, my Sonos Fives spring into action. I don't need to load the app, I don't need to touch anything. It just happens.

If I turn on my TV, those same Sonos Fives revert into surround speakers into a 5.1 system with the Sonos Beam - again, without touching the Sonos app or any device.

If I want to create a playlist that crosses between my personal music library on a local server, and also songs via Apple Music and Youtube Music, no problem.

If I want to set things up for things to play on one speaker, specific speakers, or my whole house, it's got it, and allows me to easily adjust volumes between the various areas.

We got burned by the Sonos app updates this year. They really screwed things up. Most things, at this point, are largely fixed, although it feels like the foundation is shaky.

If there's another product that provides this level of flexibility... let me know.

> Most things, at this point, are largely fixed,

Loading the app and getting a state where you can play back something on Android still steals me way too many seconds multiple times a day.

> I might be glossing over some details but isn't this problem largely solved by other products almost everyone has now? Any cloud music service, a smart phone, and some bluetooth speakers?

How do I configure several bluetooth speakers to play music across my whole house with a single phone?

https://www.whathifi.com/advice/what-is-auracast-and-when-is...

Interesting. My Pixel 8, on Android 15, does not seem to allow broadcasting to multiple bluetooth devices, but I'll play around with it.

> isn't this problem largely solved by other products

No? I don’t want to use my speakers as output for all the audio from any given device, only the stream I want. So, the audio system needs to be capable of managing the stream itself, independent of the device I use to select/start/stop the stream. I don’t know of anything other than Sonos that manages that well.

(Never mind the sibling comments point about syncing multiple wireless speakers to play the same audio without perceptible lag)

WiiM?

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