Streaming speaker biz Sonos lays offs workers as it finds its voice Hi-Fi Wi-Fi streaming speaker supplier Sonos is in a hole and sees Amazon Alexa-style voice control as the way out. The firm has decided to develop its own voice-control system, and this is going to cost a great deal of money. CEO John Macfarlane says: "Voice is a big change for us, so we’ll invest what’s required to bring it …
Sonos has been living on borrowed time and one has to agree with the author that such a dramatic track change will be extremely difficult to achieve. I cannot see a hi-end Sonos suddenly competing with a low-end voice control system. Also Sonos's propriety technological base does not lend itself to this new direction and voice technology has up to now been very expensive and hard from a research perspective.
All one do is wish them Good Luck.
Not sure it is "too small too late". Seems pretty big to me. Too big.
I suspect it is unneeded and unwanted by the typical current customer base and by the time they have a product to offer (assuming they make it that far), unlikely to appeal to new customers with so many well funded competing products already there or likely to emerge.
Can't help thinking this is probably a fatal strategy if they want to thrive and remain independent. If they are looking to be bought out then, from an outsiders viewpoint, I'm not sure it's such a great move either.
@inmypjs: I don't know why you were downvoted. You're totally correct, but indeed, also about the target customer base -- 24 bit audio is extremely important to measurebators.
For the rest of us, well, just see the ratio of upvotes to downvotes under your (and mine) posts.
I mean, 144 dB SNR. While noise is at the absolute threshold of hearing (ATH), the music is booming at 144 dB (sound of a jet plane 50 m away). I don't thing you'd be able to hear the noise. I don't even think the speakers would be able to reproduce sound at 144 dB (or would be allowed to, since threshold of pain is 130 dB, and eardrum rupture happens at 150 dB).
96 dB SNR at 16 bits is already way above any requirement -- a vacuum cleaner at a distance of 1 m is 70 dB. That would mean your music would have to be 8 times louder than that vacuum cleaner while noise would be at ATH.
UK health and safety laws start to kick in above 85dB and note that levels above this put your hearing at risk of permanent damage, the allowable limits drop off quite quickly, at 97db, just above 16bits, the daily limit is 3 hours, but by the time you get to 115dB it's 15mins, and that would be a pretty unpleasant experience for most (these limits may well be lower these days)
It seems to me those clamoring for 24bit audio have never experienced sustained 96dB.
Ironically, Qualcomm Allplay totally destroyed sonos is most areas, it's got 24/96 lossless support, some amazing sounding hardware (I have some all8 and all5 and they sound amazing , among with an all1 that connects optically to my existing system). They room to room latency is massively lower too (by a factor of 10), it's also a more open platform that sonos (Allplay is underpinned by open sauce alljoyn iot and has multiple but name manufacturers onboard, and everything interoperates, as Qualcomm supply the iot board and stack, the hardware manufacturers do the soundstage and casing)
I can already ask Google to play whatever I want via it...
Sonos are years behind, but brain-dead consumers that buy names they know are oblivious.
I don't know if their main goal should be 24 bit lossless, or better build quality (like less of the high resonance plastic, decent drivers) and maybe a leaflet explaining to users the difference between positional audio and a plastic speaker on its side under the dining table.
I've no argument with people buying this stuff - sometimes it's important (to some people) not to miss a second of Mr Bieber's latest warblings while you pop out for a slash, but for people to debate over whether the listening 'experience' of a badly placed plastic speaker would be better or worse if they increased the bitrate just seems a trifle, dare I say, wanky?
Personally, I would have much prefered an optical SPDIF input for CONNECT, and a 5GHz-band WiFi support. I certainly can use both.
The only thing I am interested in for any microphone-containing gadget other than a phone these days, is how to disable the listening function at the hardware level.
Why does everyone keep saying Sonos are high sound quality? It's acceptable, sure, but no match for even a mid range stereo from the 90s. Sonos isn't even stereo unless you buy two per room for goodness sake!
This isn't a good move for them, they aren't agile enough to compete with Amazon and not popular enough to compete with Apple. The best thing any wireless speaker company could do right now is make a great API so when we ask Siri or Echo to play a song they can seamlessly play it on the wireless speaker. Heck, I'd even settle for being able to stream sound from an iPhone to a Sonos but they are playing the proprietary game thinking they are bigger than they are. Sonos make nice devices but there is a whole lot wrong with them and this goes in a direction other than improvement.
++Agree.
I can get most of my devices to stream to Sonos most of the time, but it's a bit unreliable, has huge latency and uses clunky third-party software.
And for anyone who has a music collection that extends beyond whatever's popular at this micro-instant, it's music player is primitive.
With this announcement I don't see either of these being improved any time, let alone soon.
Blimey I must be older than I thought. I have a strange tendency with music to want to LISTEN to it, rather than 'consume' it. If there's music playing 'in the background', I tune it out, unless I'm in a position to turn it off.
I really don't see any point in streaming a piece of music into a shitty plastic speaker in the middle of a dining room. How does such a 'rich experience' compare with sitting in a comfortable chair with Jochum's arrangement of Carmina Burana thundering out around you? Why would you take Mary Black's painstaking studio work to produce a recording that places her right in the room with you, and run it in the background as an MP3 through a nasty piece of plastic to keep you company while you do some drilling?
And where did that 'experience' thing come from anyway? Last week, Optus rang me and said 'You're due a new mobile. Do you want [BRAND REDACTED]?" "oh, go on then", I replied.
Two days later, a droid from Optus rang me up. Would I mind answering a few questions about my retail experience?
My response, "Sorry, I have no retail experience, I'm a software developer" dodn't seem to be the answer she wanted. FFS, I bought a phone. That's it. I didn't 'have an experience', I just bought a phone.
Nurse! Quickly! The Screens!!
then you havent got big enough speakers.
fuck sonos and buy some decent kit. just one decent pair of missions per household is enough.
on the other hand, given sonos sound "quality", you may as well just play the radio on your smart phone. put phone in back pocket. the music follows you seamlessly....magic!
Sonos said "Like many high growth companies, Sonos constantly evaluates its workforce to ensure we have the skills and talent to lead us to the next series of milestones. Our opportunity has never been greater as the transition to streaming accelerates. We’re in a terrific position to continue delivering great listen-out-loud experiences at home now, and in the future", when laying off employees.
I can only conclude that this "high growth" company has strong cash flow, and therefore they were callously discarding loyal staff to improve shareholder returns.
So in return, let me say: Like many high growth customers, I constantly evaluate manufacturers to ensure they show the loyalty and reliability I require for my next series of purchases. My opportunity has never been greater as my transition to Sonos' competitors accelerates. I'm in a terrific position to continue buying great listen-out-loud experiences at home now, and in the future, only never from Sonos.
Good luck guys. You'll need it.
"Turn off sound"
"Did you mean turn up sound? Volume up to 9."
"No, Turn OFF"
"Oh, you want it even louder. Volume to 10."
"NO, YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT. TURN! OFF! NOW!"
"What? I can't hear you very well. You want it even louder? Ok. Volume to 11!"
--
Why the fuck would anyone want a voice-controlled loudspeaker system? It makes as much sense as TV for the blind. Or bicycles for fish.
On the rare occasion that I was in a hot tub and it was running, it was a roar, to the point that any conversation required raised voices. If you're listening to music, I imagine it has to be quite loud already, so to do any voice control, you would need to be shouting.
If you can afford a Sonos speaker system and a hot tub, you could really look into getting a water-resistant phone, too.
Sonos and everything like it is the half ass way to do multiroom audio. It is not quality coming from a mono little plastic speaker box. The real way is to have in ceiling and in wall speakers with keypads coming from a central amplification system. Sonos is the equivalent of using a battery powered radio with your cell phone to the line input.
One massive set won't do. I want to listen in several locations without shaking the whole house and having the output filtered through walls and floors. I absolutely do not want any sort of "personal assistant" overreach. I don't personally want internet connectivity (I'm playing an MP3 collection) so making that optional would suffice while not ruling out online streaming.
I want affordable "good enough" speaker sets, individual music choice, and independent volume control in: my gym area, bike shop, Tiki Lounge, kitchen, back porch, master bedroom, master bath. Come on, someone step up...
This is exactly what Sonos does. It will play mp3 and flac over SMB, independently, in stereo pairs, or synced to the millisecond. I can't tell you whether it will index hundreds of thousands of files, but it can handle ten thousand.
Audiophiles, methinks you protest too much.
Now looking to buy another pair of Play 1s immediately, to avoid voice recognition.
"We’re in a terrific position to continue delivering great listen-out-loud experiences at home now, and in the future"
Sorry? What is a 'Listen-out-loud experience'? Is it in anyway related to a 'listen-in-total-silence experience'? or a 'listen-while-humming-the-theme-to-the-Simpsons experience'?
Or has the Sonos Marketing team finally turned the corner?
I think it's their way of describing listening to a stereo as opposed to headphones. They can't say stereo experience, because their stereo doesn't do stereo so using the generic term is awkward here. The funny thing is that my quadrophonic system from the 80s (in classy silver) was also always referred to as a stereo. Of course my "old fashioned" 80s stereo also had controls you could use to operate it independently, and it could play things locally, and accepted multiple inputs. In fact, it was better in every single way than the Sonos, and in real terms was a fraction of the cost. The only downside was that it was huge by todays standards and needed speaker wires to deliver the sound to diverse corners of the room.
haha! i had a quadraphonic Leak amp back in the day. awesome
it fucked itself ages ago unfortunately.
"The only downside was that it was huge by todays standards and needed speaker wires to deliver the sound to diverse corners of the room."
yes, those pesky cables, coming over here, delivering our audio perfectly....what you need is a shitty plastic speaker operating over bluetooth...yeah, thats what you want.
Having endured (and I do mean endured) an all day interview with 8 separate people at Sonos I can tell you they are unique people.
Every person I bar one met said 'the thing about Sonos is that every one is an A player, there are absolutely no B players here'. Really? It was obvious a phrase they were told to use as it was repeated by all 7.
The exception was a very senior guy who said 'When you join Sonos there is a fog and it takes a while to emerge from that'. I just nodded, I still have no idea what he was on about.
Lost in their own self importance the lot of them.
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