[miah_]

Sonos hardware is the stuff I see at thrift stores for ~$8 and won't even bother with. When you're as user hostile as they are you end up in landfills.

Wish somebody would figure out how to unlock them and convert them into general purpose music streaming systems.

[BikiniPrince]

Someone finally did for at least the Sonos One. After selling it in stores they quickly abandoned it. The CEO promised air play 2 update while it was being sold and then back peddled after discontinuing it. At first they said they would retire it entirely and effectively kill it. They eventually back peddled on that too after massive backlash. This was when I decided never to buy their locked in garbage again. Meanwhile, someone released a small app that advertised the device for airplay 2. It quietly runs on my garage server.

[iwanttocomment]

Huh? Sonos has done lots wrong lately, but the Sonos One does natively support Airplay 2, was in stores for over 7 years, and still works with the current Sonos software as well as, uh, anything does these days. Perhaps you're thinking of something else?

[kristjansson]

What? AFAIK the only speaker that’s fully useless is the Gen 1 Play:5. A few of the Connect / ZonePlayer home audio devices are also incompatible with S2. But everything else will still work, albeit with slightly higher friction setup processes on some?

[miah_]

I don't want to touch my phone to stream music in my home. I don't want a app involved, apart from maybe setup. I don't want 'cloud' involved _at all_.

I want to point my music 'streaming' device at a NFS or SMB directory and play music. Would be better if it supported some OSS streaming protocol so I could just stream off my LAN (think mpd/dlna but I have no idea what protocols are "best" here).

I'd love to open up foobar2000 or whatever, and point it at what speakers I want and let loose.

Ya, some rpi solution is "probably best here". I know they're(Sonos) going for 'this works for people who dont know what a rpi is", but stereo gear works for a long time. I don't want to be on some 'upgrade cycle' because they've decided I need to upgrade hardware so they can harvest more dollars from my wallet.

Maybe the problem is that ["I have a stereo", "mp3's", "CD's"] and they are targeting people who want to play Spotify from some 'i-device' to a speaker and don't have a stereo. Either way, the hardware is 100% avoid for me. Its a gamble on 'will it work' and 'will they support it?'.

[failrate]

It is probably easier to use RaspberryPi.

[alkonaut]

I built a sonos "clone" using a raspberry, the HiFiBerry board, shairplay, and an expensive amp/speakers that allowed digital connections (because doing anything with a raspberry and audio is pretty noisy when analog). Overall it cost about as much as a pair of Sonos 5's. In the end, the thing is now unused, and I went and bought a Sonos5 and couldn't be happier. Tiny things I just never got working in the Linux world are "just works" with Sonos. Sure, it has some annoyances but trivial things like "playback never starts with a loud pop" was almost impossible to get right. Tinkering with audio in Linux is rarely fun. Not to mention that i only built one system so never even had to deal with time syncing multiple systems (Though I'm sure someone has built some sort of linux solution to handle that too by now).

So having done both of these two systems each for several years, I can strongly recommend Sonos.

Sonos 5's (gen2) still sell for $4-500 used where I am. Which is astonishing for a product that is many years old by now and is $6-750 new. I wouldn't exactly say that's landfill. The Ikea bookshelf thing is also great and costs very little. Sound isn't comparable to the Five though. If you see a Sonos speaker for $8 in a thrift store, it's either broken or you should buy it and sell it on ebay.