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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 9:04:47 GMT
I put this in the general hi-fi section as you could argue the sound quality is good enough to be loosely termed hifi. I recently decided to go Sonos. Motivations were, 1. multi room & wireless (apart from mains cable). 2. Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, TuneIn for all our music and radio needs (Inc Swedish radio) and many, many more supported. 3. Compact / looks / discrete. 4. Stereo pairing possible. 5. 5.0 or 5.1 for the lounge. 6. Voice controlled for basics, so not always needing a remote or phone/tablet. Other solution looked at either can't do all of the above today, cost even more and/or are locked in to one eco-system i.e Apple. I started out wanting to replace a separate radio in each room solution. We were plugging in phones to get Swedish radio, trying to Bluetooth with varied success, there were drop outs, can't use phone when plugged in across the kitchen etc etc I got Sonos ones for each room (or so I first thought). One for kitchen, bedroom, lounge, workshop.. Before consigning a nice new Sonos One to my dusty workshop I tried a stereo pair in the lounge. I was surprised at how good this was! For casual listening / exploring / background music the sound is great. Deep bass notes, clear, well balanced sound. I'd dismissed Amazon's echo on sq grounds. Google more expensive and Apple, well let's not go there!  So, I found another solution for the workshop. Echo dot playing into Bose wave radio (20 years old this year). Hands free and cheap. Sounds ok for the workshop. The TV sound was bugging me. So I got a Sonos Beam. Fresh out! At first I used ARC but found this a little unpredictable as to getting TV sound back if other music streaming services were played. So used the TVs optical out. That works 100% Next came a 5.0 solution using the two Sonos Ones as rears. Great movie experience, much clearer voice presentation Vs the TV speakers. Then I tried the two Sonos Ones that were rears in the lounge with the single Ones in the bedroom and kitchen. The stereo sound is so good that's where they are now staying - forever! I have just bought two (slightly cheaper) Sonos play 1's to use as rears in the lounge. These don't have voice control but the Beam does that for the surround system  They are of course wireless but don't have voice control. They do have the same speaker tech and type as the Sonos ones.. Once they are in, I'll be happy for a while. At some point a Sonos connect amp and outdooy speakers may make an appearance.. We have no drop outs or loss of music. Party mode or everywhere as it's called is great. Same music whole house in synch to same quality, or each room doing something separate, it's up to you. Anyone else use Sonos or other similar solutions? I'll cover some of the bugs and hiccups next     |
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Post by MikeMusic on Aug 13, 2018 9:23:02 GMT
Interesting Steve
Assumed the quality would be average at best
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Post by mikeyb on Aug 13, 2018 10:18:45 GMT
Two Play ones are supposed to sound really good. I keep meaning to pick up a pair for the kitchen /dining room and get rid of our Play 3
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Post by Slinger on Aug 13, 2018 12:05:44 GMT
Along with the Pi (which I have adopted) it's great to hear about alternative solutions to how music, and more, is delivered beyond the ubiquitous boxes in a rack. It can also highlight the difference between listening to your music and listening to your hi-fi.
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 12:40:31 GMT
Interesting Steve Assumed the quality would be average at best I'd say very average compared to my horn system, but it's not about that. Above average compared to other compact high WAF solutions. For parties / get togethers I'd say it beats most. They go pretty loud to. |
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 12:43:35 GMT
Two Play ones are supposed to sound really good. I keep meaning to pick up a pair for the kitchen /dining room and get rid of our Play 3 That's interesting, could you not get another Play3 or can they not be paired? The stereo pair is great. I've found the Trueplay tuning with a phone and wandering round the room whilst it does DSP room correction to be good, but have to borrow daughters iPhone to do it, as bizarrely it's not on Android. |
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 12:53:11 GMT
Along with the Pi (which I have adopted) it's great to hear about alternative solutions to how music, and more, is delivered beyond the ubiquitous boxes in a rack. It can also highlight the difference between listening to your music and listening to your hi-fi. Yes, there are many ways to do it. Convenience high on the list for all other rooms than hifi room. I've been trying playing my flac files from laptop interesting. Def. an improvement over regular highres Spotify or Deezer (equivalent res). Not massive, but def. an improvement. A slightly purer sound. TuneIn is a bit poorer quality than Spotify etc, but for radio it's quite acceptable. I am tempted to try Deezer hifi at £20 a month, both for horn system and Sonos.. It's 1440kb/s = Flac. I can find most music there. With a couple of odd ball exceptions - hmm not tested it on Swedish catalogue though. Must do that |
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Post by mikeyb on Aug 13, 2018 13:19:28 GMT
Two Play ones are supposed to sound really good. I keep meaning to pick up a pair for the kitchen /dining room and get rid of our Play 3 That's interesting, could you not get another Play3 or can they not be paired? I think it's generally considered that a single play 3 isn't really a good as 2 x play 1's and this made me think of the 2 x play 1 scenario and I never even thought of 2 x play 3's to be honest lol. Mind you in our dining room I think 2 x play 1's would look better than 2 x play 3's. |
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Post by MikeMusic on Aug 13, 2018 13:49:44 GMT
Interesting Steve Assumed the quality would be average at best I'd say very average compared to my horn system, but it's not about that. Above average compared to other compact high WAF solutions. For parties / get togethers I'd say it beats most. They go pretty loud to. Mid fi ! |
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 17:34:25 GMT
That's interesting, could you not get another Play3 or can they not be paired? I think it's generally considered that a single play 3 isn't really a good as 2 x play 1's and this made me think of the 2 x play 1 scenario and I never even thought of 2 x play 3's to be honest lol. Mind you in our dining room I think 2 x play 1's would look better than 2 x play 3's. Yeah, they are pretty neat. The One can be voice controlled. The Play 1 not. If voice control is your thing. Sonos did not allow stereo pairing of the One and Play 1, unfortunately. |
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 20:16:12 GMT
With regards to the setup.
I use a Lan connection from my router to the Beam in the lounge.
Plugging this in automatically switches all the Sonos gear from your routers WiFi network to their own mesh network.
That can way the load on the routers WiFi is greatly reduced.
I note have 7 Sonos speakers, we have laptops, phones, tablets etc..
I never had dropouts before and have never experienced any since going mesh..
We do have pure WiFi here, not having nearby neighbours. At our previous home it was very congested WiFi wise.
You can even use the Sonos mesh network for your phone's WiFi network etc.
The two Play 1's I'd ordered arrived this evening.
Very quick to plumb in and they do indeed sound identical to the Ones.
Once installed, which is easy peasy, the most important setting in the app for the surround system is to get the rear volume right. Marie was most upset at too thunderous effects on the rears before I sorted that out.
The other thing is to tell them to play at equal volume to the Beam when playing music. Very straightforward.
Then sit back and listen.
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 13, 2018 21:03:38 GMT
Other things to note. They say that Sonos will not be tied to Amazon Alexa. Google assistant and even Siri are on the roadmap. Apple are usually pretty snotty about sharing so I'll believe the latter when I see, or rather, speak it Gripes and bugs then? 1. Thehe latest release of the Sonos App for Android is 9.0.1. On my Moto G5 Android 7.0 it absolutely eats the battery. From lasting a whole day to less than half a day with the Sonos app installed. It used more than the screen when it's on full bright outside and I was on the phone a lot! Bizarrely on Marie's Nokia 3 Android 7.1 and Lenovo Android 6.0 have no such problems! The Sonos chat forum is awash with people having severe batt drain problems on various phones and Android versions with the Sonos 9.0.1 app. No fix as yet, must just be sloppy coding and not enough version testing! Closing the app does not work, even ending it in developer tools does not kill it. Uninstalling does! I have to use version 8.6 of the Sonos app on my phone. Not even on the app battery use chart and all is fine again! It does however lack the speaker EQ and surround sound setup utilities. No big problem once I've set them. Can always borrow Marie's phone fot that. 2. To use voice commands you need an Alexa app on your phone. You then load in the 'skills' you want. Spotify, TuneIn, BBC, Swedish Radio etc.. these 'skills' are apparently written by the media provider not Sonos but they probably coordinate the process. Spotify works well, BBC works well. Swedish radio does not work at all. The service is activated but theres no 'skill' or its wrongly implemented and fails. So whilst I can ask Alexa on my echo dot to "play Swedish Radio P3" or even the more complicated "play Swedish Radio P4 Östergötland", Alexa on Sonos cannot! Note, I'm not the only Swedish speaker with a Sonos One and there was a dead thread on Swedish Radio's support site about it. So I woke it up and gave them some more info. They even bought a Sonos One and had confirmed it didn't work! What I noticed and got them back on the case again was that Swedish radio had written a 'skill' for their flash news briefing and that works fine for Sonos Alexa. So how hard can it be to do it for the other radio stations?! They have assigned developers to this once the holiday season is over I can of course use the app to play any of the hundreds and hundreds of world stations available on TuneIn and other supported radio content providers. 3. Not every phrase you say is recognised by Alexa, usually thinking a bit more and asking in a different way does the trick, do no big gripe. 4. You can't group Amazon Echo's or Echo dot's with Sonos devices. So no party mode across the two. I can understand why of course. Just buy another Play 1 if that's a real issue.. Other things: -Amazon Echo's don't do stereo pairs, neither does Apples rather expensive smart home speaker (at the moment). - Amazon Echo didn't come close to Sonos One sound wise. -Google's smart home speaker costs a lot more and did not sound as good as a Sonos stereo pair. - I didn't audition Apple's smart home speaker. Not going down the Apple music route.. What's next. - I might get a Sonos connect amp (55wpc D class) for the garden. There are several 2nd hand on eBay. That can drive a stereo pair of proper outdoor speakers (wired). It would need power of course and work off the Sonos mesh network like all the other speakers. It would also need to be kept dry. Simple enough to have a box for it. - I'd like a speaker in the bathroom, have a crappy dab radio at the moment. But no power in there and it is probably a bridge too far for Marie - hehe. |
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Post by Stratmangler on Aug 14, 2018 10:01:47 GMT
Does Sonos still have the library size restriction?
There used to be issues handling Hi-Res files too - is that still the case?
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Post by Stratmangler on Aug 14, 2018 10:25:52 GMT
I've found the answers to my questions.
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 14, 2018 21:09:25 GMT
I've found the answers to my questions.
I think the was some 65000 song restriction too. I have some higher resolution files but he not tried to play them yet In the meantime the Alexs voice activation of Swedish Radio is mostly fixed. All stations apart from P4 Östergötland now work. No matter how we say Östergötland, she won't play that station.. every other region though.. Just need the app battery drain bug fix now.. |
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Post by speedysteve on Aug 16, 2018 19:33:13 GMT
After further discussions and testing, reloading a new skill for Swedish radio in the Alexa and using the word Play before the radio station, even P4 Östergötland works for me now!
Marie however, who was born in the neighbouring county can't ever get Alexa to play that station now!
It's our favourite station btw. We lived in Östergötland for many years and they have the best presenters and reports of all the regional stations.
The Swedish radio Webmaster with whom I've been in contact about this, said they had a chuckle about our problem as the Östergötland dialect is known for being particularly broad and the guy who did the voice recordings was from there!
He did many variations including with strong dialect and without!
Just goes to show how an algorithm taking umpteen dialect variations, tones, inflections and speeds can get it pretty wrong..
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Post by speedysteve on Sept 15, 2018 13:53:33 GMT
I'm still greatly enjoying my Sonos multi room stereo setup. The only slight problem that remains now is getting Alexa to understand Swedish Radio "P4 Östagötland". It was problematic at first, then bizarrely worked fine for about a week, and now we can't get that radio station no matter how we say it. I use the Sonos app to play it so it's not a huge problem. All the other local radio stations that comprise P4 work fine and many of them have very Swedish sounding names. It's only important to us as we really like that stations mix of music and topical interest and presenters. We've had a long and good humoured discussion with Radio Sweden's Webmaster well Webmistress Annika about it and they are still working on it.. They've had good feedback about good Alexa is partially sighted and blind people. A real godsend! The other problem I had was with high battery drain caused by the Sonos app on my Motorola G5 phone. This appears to be fixed. Sonos brought out a new version of the app which improved things greatly. The other thing that helped and brought my phone in line with Marie's Nokia N3, was to stop adoptive memory usage of the Ultra fast San disc SD card I have and go back to internal memory for all the apps and SD card for vids, music, Spotify etc. On Kitkat and Nougat adoptive memory is a bit half arsed and pointless. The next phone I get will have at least 64GB internal and a huge battery That seems to have fixed it completely. |
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Post by MartinT on Sept 15, 2018 16:34:33 GMT
Some apps are naughty with battery usage when they are supposedly not running. Waze is one of the worst, despite being a superb satnav app. You have to go to lengths to make sure it's not running. The LG Diagnosis app that came with my Q6 is handy for this. I'm on Oreo 8.1 here.
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Post by speedysteve on Sept 15, 2018 17:11:54 GMT
Yeah, I wonder if it got fragmented someway between internal and SD memories.
Perhaps executables internal, data on SD, and then CPU works like crazy on retrieval.
To go from nearly 0.5A usage and 4hrs CPU usage in a day of hardly using the app to what it has used today since 8am being 10mAh total and 3m12s CPU time, something very weird was going on! Just for one app very strange!
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Post by speedysteve on Jul 3, 2019 20:44:21 GMT
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