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If I was shopping for speakers right now
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
I bought a used old gen Sonos Connect about a year ago to integrate my Logitech Z906 into an existing pair of Sonos speakers. They made it deliberately tedious to downgrade those speakers (who had gotten the S2 "blessing") back to S1 to make them work with the Sonos Connect. I'm an IT repair shop guy and I cursed all the way through this downgrade process.
I would have gladly bought current hardware from them again if their prices were anywhere within the realm of plausibility. Credit where it's due, that Sonos Connect hookup with the 2 wall-mounted 1st party speakers works absolutely reliably. That company just seriously lost its bearings since they engineered those parts.
Wow, I just had to help an elderly person with this at my work
With laying off 100 employees?
With getting a Sonos device connected to the app
I have a few of them at work, installed by my predecessor. They randomly break when the app updates and are a pain to get back online.
I suppose I should expect a call back in a few weeks then lol. It took me over an hour to get this one sorted out, it was really quite ridiculous. I can't even say what specifically it was I would be "doing" wrong, it legitimately seemed like it was broken by its own design.
It really does feel like their setup process is broken! Also, they fortunately only seem to break every 6ish months or so, which isn't a lot but it's really not great either. Maybe since it's a newer one it'll break less for the person you set it up for!
Hopefully, it was just to get the phone connected to the device so he could turn on the enhanced speech setting! Now that it's set up I'm hoping he never needs to use it again lol