What a bunch of clowns idiots (edited to remove the implication that clowns are genuinely as clueless and incompetent as Sonos execs). When Sonos launched in 2004 they were far ahead of any other company in the connected speaker landscape. And they stayed best-of-the-best for a dozen years. Since the S1/S2 split they have been on a steady down trajectory with no signs of improvement.
Now another bunch of employees are getting the axe while the decision makers who have steadily ruined their service remain at the helm. Good job, Sonos.
If I was shopping for speakers right now I know exactly what not to buy.
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