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IKEA, Sonos & Amazon

oivavoi

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Wow. Great news for sonos! I sincerely think that Sonos is the best thing that has happened to the future of stereo in a long time. It has led youngish people to listen in stereo again (or on decent mono speakers), instead of on crappy Bluetooth speakers or the inbuilt speakers on the iPad. Now Sonos only needs to find a way to stream audio from YouTube, and all will be well.
 

Darwin

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Sonos is not doing well financially at all and has had layoffs and several CEO's recently.
Their home theater gear is falling behind rapidly especially since it still only works with optical and does not support the latest formats or even common ones.
 

oivavoi

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Sonos is not doing well financially at all and has had layoffs and several CEO's recently.
Their home theater gear is falling behind rapidly especially since it still only works with optical and does not support the latest formats or even common ones.

Do you have any info on their recent financial situation? I searched a bit but couldn't find anything. I agree that sonos is not cutting edge when it comes to home theater. But I believe that it works well for quite a lot of "ordinary" end users who just use the soundbar for TV and netflix etc. The serious home theater crowd will probably go for other solutions.

Regarding the departure of the CEO and other employees (I guess you refer to the layoffs in the beginning of the year). I'm not sure how much we should read into it. I think Sonos decided to change direction a bit, and focus more on voice integration, and general smart home applications. Personally I would have liked Sonos to stay focused on music, but I understand that they need to do what's needed to get people to buy their products.
 

Darwin

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Sonos has had multiple layoffs over the last few years.
I did recently buy two Sonos Ones for a stereo pair as bedroom speakers. Sound is adequate for the price. I replaced two Vanatoo One Speakers, with an Apple TV attached by optical for Airplay, and an Echo dot plus all the associated cables. They don't sound as good as the Vanatoo Ones but close enough for the price and cleaning up a lot of things.
I also play to them from Roon.
But I won't buy their home theater products until they update them. I don't like soundbars anyway and one of the things they could do is provide the ability to make two Plays 5's work as left and right instead of a soundbar plus a sub and two Sonos One's. Then provide HDMI and recent audio formats and watch the money fly out of my wallet.
I think they don't have the revenue for that level of R&D though.
They are now providing direct from Pandora, Spotify and I think a few others access to play to Sonos speakers and manage them too and Airplay 2 is coming. So they are opening up and even though I think they were forced to do that its still a good thing.
 

Ralph_Cramden

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