Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsa great idea with serious software issues
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2019
Depending on when you ask me, I will either tell you I love these speakers or kind of hate them with a white hot burning passion. I've been looking for a whole-house sound system for a while. I have a very strong mesh WiFi network, so when I saw these speakers and the reviews talking about how great the sound was, I decided to take the plunge and purchased a bunch of them (10) to hang everywhere around my house, basement to second floor.
At first, I absolutely loved them. Their sound, as reported by others, is excellent. And the addition of Alexa made controlling them so convenient. I really fell in love with them and started telling everyone about how great they were. Then, about 4 weeks in, I started running into issues which have plagued me ever since, and I can't seem to get the system back into a stable state.
The issue seems to stem from the integration with the Amazon Alexa software. The first odd thing I noticed was that occasionally, the speakers seem to just turn dumb, for lack of a better term. You wake them to ask for something and they ding indicating they are listening, but no matter how carefully you articulate your request, they pause for a few seconds and then just die. Or they respond to confirm a request for something that doesn't even remotely sound like what you requested. Or, perhaps most annoyingly, they respond correctly and start playing the thing you requested for about 10 seconds before just fading out and stopping without explanation.
I have tried restarting the speakers, my cell phone, my WiFi, and my Internet router, all to no avail. When the speakers just decide to not work for some reason it seems you have no choice but to wait for 6 or 7 hours or so for them to start working again, for reasons as mysterious as the reasons they stopped. I can't tell you how aggravating that is, particularly since these speakers are supposed to be a nice mid-level solution that should just work.
Another annoyance I've noticed is that occasionally one of the speakers will simply drop from the Sonos software, causing that speaker to be completely unresponsive and uncontrollable no matter what you do. The only way to re-add it to a group when this happens is to stop all activity on every speaker and have them do their best impressions of expensive bricks until you open the Sonos software and find that the missing speaker has reappeared. Which leads to another bug, which is that sometimes the speakers will simply decide to not take commands, verbal or in the Sonos software. You tell them to 'stop' or 'cancel' and they don't. So you grab your phone and open the Sonos app, click on the speaker group, and click the stop button and...nothing happens. Just keeps right on playing. It's absolutely maddening to be ignored like this by your "digital assistant"; you are often left with no choice but to go around unplugging speakers around the house to get everything back to a base status.
These problems could be YMMV type issues; plenty of reviews practically glow when talking about them. It could also be that by buying so many I exposed myself to more hassle than most and would have been better off purchasing fewer of them and accepting some sound gaps. But my feeling is that as these are not cheap speakers, and that since at least according to the product literature I should be able to setup the speakers in a configuration like this, it shouldn't be this much hassle.
My gut feeling is that the integration between Sonos and Amazon is not very stable and that problems crop up over time. I say this because I have noticed that Alexa updates seem to happen at a breakneck pace, which introduces weirdness all on its own. For example, for over a month I could ask Alexa to 'play NPR' and the speaker would open the radio station without issue. Then one day the exact same request prompted a series of questions about where I lived, which station identifier I wanted, etc. What the heck? Why take something that worked and make it more complex for no reason whatsoever?
The bottom line is that when they do work they are amazing. I just wish Sonos and Amazon could get some more stability into their products, because otherwise this will never be more than a niche product.
Edit 12/15/2019:
I was going to ignore the comment by the manufacturer, but since this is the season when people might be spending a lot of money on these things, I'm just going to post a quick follow-up. In between the quietly sponsored 5 star "reviews", manufacturers do damage control PR when someone does post a negative comment about their products. The responses are meant to convey the idea of 'sure, here is a negative comment, but we're nice guys and look how politely we listened to his complaint and offered to help; this negative experience was probably not even our fault and in any case it certainly won't happen to you.'
So here's my truth: I did take them up on their suggestion to call for support. It was an agonizing multi-hour call where they had me repeat the exact same troubleshooting steps over and over and over again, right down to connecting the devices to the local LAN for setup and using a computer connected to the LAN to run tests against them. Nothing they did fixed the issues, but the technician had no strategy but to keep asking me to repeat the same steps until, after 6 repetitions or so, I gave up in frustration. And honestly, I think that was his goal. He certainly wasn't learning anything by asking me to repeat the steps ad nauseam when we were receiving the exact same results each time. I think the idea was that if they could make me give up in frustration first, they could frame the experience as me giving up when all they wanted to do was help. It's actually clever, in it's own infernal little way.
The reality is that if you read commentary around the web, you'll see that I'm not the only one reporting weird, glitchy behavior out of these devices, particularly if you are using the Alexa interface as opposed to the Google one. The rate of issues also seems to be affected by how many you have on your network. One or two, and you might not have many issues. More, and the odds seem to shift considerably. This product has (in my opinion) a hardware or software (or both) issue that causes the speakers to drop out periodically without explanation, occasionally flat out refuse to join a network, or go dead to commands for random periods of time. I can't say that if you buy these you absolutely will have a problem, but I feel comfortable saying that there is a chance, and it might be higher than you would be comfortable with, given the expense of the units.
