[baybal2]

It looks so much of an overkill on the digital side. A fully fledged SoC with PCI Express and standalone WiFi NIC just to do network, and audio decode?

Chinese factories make such Internet radios on $2 Espressif or Realtek microcontrollers.

[chendragon]

It looks like the processor is doing some form of DSP, so some smarts are required. It can also play from Spotify etc. and the binaries for that are probably bloated like most cloud services.

With this said, had this been a lower end product, the SoC would probably have been an Allwinner or MTK with a soldered Realtek SDIO WiFi solution.

[Marsymars]

> It can also play from Spotify etc. and the binaries for that are probably bloated like most cloud services.

One of my favourite things about my Sonos setup is that it avoids me having to run bloated cloud service binaries on my personal computing devices. (Most notably, of the services I use, SiriusXM digital services have always been most unpleasant to use.)

[Gwypaas]

That's what made me ditch sonos 4 years ago. Being forced to run everything through the awful Sonos app instead of casting from the dedicated app or playing through Bluetooth without any delays.

[Marsymars]

Last I checked, the Sonos app is better than the SiriusXM app. Not that I use it much anyway, I mostly use Sonos/Sirius via Alexa control.

[solarkraft]

What do you use now? Seems to me like the only decent solution is UPnP.

[dingaling]

But the cost of that convenience is in giving random devices full access to both your LAN and the Internet.

You could VLAN them into a separate audio-devices network and whitelist their Internet access but the effort in doing that would seem to outweigh any advantages of network audio devices.

Sometimes a dumb, network-unaware Bluetooth audio sink just works...

[Marsymars]

I've never found either Bluetooth, or the Sirius app to "just work". And Sonos is an established company, their speakers aren't "random devices" in the same sense as random IoT devices from Amazon.

[baybal2]

What I see on photos is a genuine PCI Express WiFi, just like one you see in notebooks.

And the fact that the module is 3rd labeled, suggests that either Broadcom or Realtek is involved

[person_of_color]

Why do you need PCIe WiFI for audio?!

[markonen]

Worth noting on the wireless side that this unit, if plugged to Ethernet, will create a dedicated SonosNet network your other Sonos speakers would then automatically join. So it’s not just a client, it’s also a base station.

[TYPE_FASTER]

And it does some signal processing to make sure all the audio across all the Sonos devices is playing in sync. And there’s a mic in there that is used to tune the audio to the room it’s in, etc.

Much more than just playback.