Sonos lays off 100 employees as its app crisis continues
theverge.com
What a bunch of clowns idiots (edited to remove the implication that clowns are genuinely as clueless and incompetent as Sonos execs). When Sonos launched in 2004 they were far ahead of any other company in the connected speaker landscape. And they stayed best-of-the-best for a dozen years. Since the S1/S2 split they have been on a steady down trajectory with no signs of improvement.
Now another bunch of employees are getting the axe while the decision makers who have steadily ruined their service remain at the helm. Good job, Sonos.
If I was shopping for speakers right now I know exactly what not to buy.
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I would buy speakers that are just speakers, which do not collect any data about me, do not rely on any computer networks, do not involve any monthly subscription fees, and do only the job of being speakers. I'd connect them to audio sources with cables, probably through a suitable mixer and/or amplifier. Not the platinum-plated $300 cables, either. It's not that complicated everyone, give it a try some day.
Yeah, I get what you're saying. Definitely. It's not complicated for one pair of speakers in one room. For one music source. For one person controlling it.
There just haven't been any better cost-effective solutions with multi-room, control from your any phone convenience. And that's a big plus for how we listen to music. Today there are a few contenders, but many of them are also cloud dependent. Really the small number of good options in this space is proof of how good Sonos was for a long time. Well and also of Spotify causing people ditch the idea of a offline digital music library.
Edit: And to be clear, aside from the "any computer networks" part, this is what the original Sonos device did. It could work without a home network, but worked best with a shared music library on a PC. Didn't need cloud anything, internet connection, account, etc. You just hooked your normal speakers to it and it played music.
I'm still using the (ancient) Squeeze system (lyrion.org these days). Default setup for new things are a raspberry with a DAC or digital out (picoreplayer), feeding into active speakers. It's open source, just works, with plugins for almost anything and has all the multiroom sync etc. You don't even need a separate server unless you want to, just add some disk to one of the raspberries and let i be your media server.
Nice, I'll check it out! I remember LMS and Squeezebox. Didn't know it would sync between rooms, and I didn't know it had been open sourced, that's excellent.
At the time we started in the Sonos ecosystem we wanted easy, and it provided that. Now I've got multiple servers running, self-hosting services for the family, slowly working on removing our cloud service dependencies. So this would fit right in.
I use it too, with the material design skin / add-on, and it's great. https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material