At this point, further complaining about Sonos is more of an exercise in bouncing the rubble than anything else. The damage from a spring overhaul is done, even though the company does continue to slowly push out improvements and fixes to its app.
But incremental improvements so far haven’t done anything about the fact that more often than not the official Sonos app just doesn’t … work. So it’s time for some third-party solutions. And a leading contender on iOS is SonoPhone.
This is a $3 app. Not $3 a month — a one-time purchase. That in and of itself is a bit of fresh air in 2024, when we’re being subscriptioned to death. Another plus is that this single app supports both current S2 devices, and the legacy S1 hardware, too. That’s a good thing.
SonoPhone purports to require fewer taps to do basic functions. I haven’t counted, but that seems to be the case. Or at least it’s close enough that I haven’t really noticed.
The user interface will take just a little getting used to, if only because it’s different than the official Sonos app. (And not just in that it, ya know, works.) Your speakers are accessible from the top — tap to see ’em. And you can group them into “zones” in a way that I think I prefer over the way Sonos does in its app. Just drag one speaker onto another to create a zone. And drag it off to break up the zone. (My “pool” speaker actually is a stereo pair of old Play:1s, and it properly appears as a single speaker. That’s good.)
All the various music options are here, too. Playlists, favorites, Sonos radio — even music stored on my NAS. It’s all there. And if you have multiple users of a single service in your home, it’s easy enough to tap through and select the right one. (If you’ve ever had a kid spoil your recommendations, you’ll know why that’s a big deal.)
SonoPhone isn’t a particularly sophisticated app, especially in the UI department. (It looks like something you might have found on the Android side of the world a decade or so ago.) And access to the deeper Sonos settings are extremely limited, including adding new speakers. You’ll need to keep the official Sonos app around, for sure.
But at least you won’t need to suffer through it on a daily basis.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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