[wslh]

Layman question: what is better in Sonos comparing it to good bluetooth speakers? Are there excellent bluetooth speakers?

I wanted to buy a Sonos but I am very confused if this will seamlessly work with the usual applications. I don't want to start firing a lot of neurons (e.g. reverse engineering) just to play audio an hour before going to bed.

[anonu]

Sonos, IMHO, works great when you have multiple speakers setup. They do well because the technology is almost dummy proof and reliable

Edit: was just going through their s1. Seems like most households have 2.75 speakers on average:

As of March 31, 2018, our customers had registered over 19 million products in approximately 6.9 million households globally. Based on customer data, we estimate that, on average, our customers listen to approximately 70 hours of content per month and to approximately 80% more music after purchasing their first Sonos product. We also estimate that our customers listened to five billion hours of audio content using our products in fiscal 2017, which represents 33% growth from fiscal 2016.

[tjohns]

Totally this. Sonos’ multi-room support is amazing.

I have 6 different Sonos systems in my house (living room, kitchen, bedroom, workshop, front yard, backyard). It’s wonderful to be able to play audio through any random grouping of speakers, all of which are guarenteed to be in sync as I walk between rooms. You can even plug in an analog source into any one of them (e.g. for a DJ setup at a party) and stream to the entire house — again, all in perfect sync.

They even work in areas where WiFi is weak, because they create their own independent mesh network.

I’ve yet to find anything else that works as reliably.

[gerdesj]

Sonos sound bloody good. I have a modern Play 5 and a 1. They absolutely fill the (12x6 ish = 60m^2 of ground floor in my house which is quite open plan). The phone app works pretty well and I have a Samba share for CDs. However it will only support SMBv1 which is a bit crap. In the past Jeremy Allison has actually offered to assist in fixing that but nothing happened. I use firewall rules to fix up security. Another crap thing is that the app is unable to find speakers on another VLAN. I wanted to lock down the speakers on my THINGS (no internets unless I say so) VLAN.

Anyway, if Home Assistant and https://www.home-assistant.io/components/sonos/ are unable to work the way that I want them to then Sonos will be relegated to "pretty but crap" status and fall off my list. I'm sure there is another way of delivering sound using wifi and IoT.

I own an IT consultancy and am evaluating stuff in this sphere. Some of the modern IoT stuff gets wow status and some doesn't but the times are changing very, very quickly. I'm slowly putting together a portfolio of products and parts. I'd like to include Sonos but the jury is out.

To answer your question: a single Play One in your bedroom for good night music will work very nicely and I don't think you will be disappointed - they do sound gorgeous.