What is Sonos? The good, the bad, and the future of wireless audio

By Simon Cohen Updated January 30, 2025

When it comes to wireless audio, there’s one brand that dominates the landscape: Sonos. It feels like it’s been around forever, and in a way, it has. The company practically created the wireless audio category when it launched its first products in 2002, and many still consider it to be the gold standard.

And yet, in May 2024 the company experienced a massive catastrophe. A rushed update to the Sonos software rendered many of its products unusable, while also removing some of its customers’ favorite features. A company-wide effort to fix the problems ensued. Eight months later, things still weren’t back to normal, and the company’s board fired long-time CEO Patrick Spence in January 2025.

Where does that leave Sonos and its customers, and would you be crazy to buy Sonos products given what has happened?

We’ll address these questions, but first, let’s go back to the beginning and cover all things Sonos. The speakers, the software, and everything in between. Let’s dig into it.

Sonos is an audio company that specializes in wireless, multi-room systems. It started in 2002 with software and hardware that let people play their personal digital music collections wirelessly using their existing speakers and amplifiers, and then rapidly expanded into designing and selling all-in-one wireless speakers.

Those speakers now include portable models that cost as little as $120 to full Dolby Atmos-capable home theater soundbars that cost almost $1,000. Sonos designed and powers Ikea’s Symfonisk range of affordable home-décor speakers; it sells an architectural series of indoor and outdoor speakers built by Sonance, and it recently created a wired-only version of its popular Era 100 speaker for the professional installer market.

All of Sonos’ hardware products, as well as those Ikea Symfonisk speakers, are controlled by the Sonos software, which typically runs as a mobile app on your phone or tablet. Sonos’ software is its secret sauce and it’s responsible for three main activities: setting up new Sonos components in your home, adjusting the settings on those components (including grouping them when you want to do so), and helping you find and play any music that you own or have access to via music streaming services, on any (or all) of your Sonos products.

If someone were to ask us what makes Sonos different from other companies that make great wireless speakers, the answer is easy: It’s the software. That’s why the May 2024 software update was such a fiasco. By undermining so many core features, Sonos took its greatest asset and turned it into a massive liability. It was so problematic, it completely overshadowed two of the company’s most interesting product launches in years: its first headphone (the Sonos Ace) and its best Dolby Atmos soundbar so far (the Arc Ultra).

We’ll talk more about the app in a moment.

Here’s everything that Sonos currently sells:

Finally, Sonos makes a series of accessories like wall mounts, floor stands, and cables, plus it has partnered with Sonance to sell three kinds of “architectural” non-amplified speakers for use with the Sonos Amp: A ceiling speaker, an in-wall speaker, and a weather-proof outdoor speaker.

*Voice-enabled smart speakers

Some of Sonos’ speakers can double as voice assistant-powered smart speakers.

As you can see in the list above (denoted with an *), the Sonos Roam 2, Era 100, Era 300, Move 2, Beam Gen 2, and Arc Ultra are all voice-enabled. However they don’t all offer the same voice assistant choices.

Initially, Sonos offered a choice of Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa on its voice-enabled speakers. It then added its own Sonos Voice Control (SVC) as a third option. This is still true on the now-discontinued Sonos Arc, Move, One, and Roam. However, most of its current lineup — with the exception of the Beam Gen 2 — are only compatible with Amazon Alexa and SVC.

Sonos says this is due to a change that Google made to its third-party speaker technical requirements prior to the debut of the Era 100 and 300 in March 2023, however we suspect it has more to do with frosty relations between the two tech companies: Sonos won a key patent dispute against Google in 2022.

For each of your voice-capable Sonos products, you select either Google Assistant (where supported) or Alexa in the Sonos app. Each voice speaker can run its own AI — so you could have Google Assistant in the kitchen and Alexa in the living room — but you can’t run both AIs simultaneously on one speaker. The exception to this is Alexa and Sonos Voice Control, which can both be active on one device, or you can use SVC on its own.

Once enabled, you can do pretty much anything with these AIs that you can do on other smart speakers that offer these assistants, like asking for the weather, controlling smart home devices, and more. But one of the best features is being able to use these AIs to play music on any Sonos product in your home, whether or not that product is itself a voice-capable speaker.

Sonos speakers can also be controlled by third-party smart speakers and voice assistants. The setup varies depending on the smart speaker. For instance, you can use Siri to control Sonos speakers, but they must first be added to the Apple Home app.

Some third-party products like AV receivers or wireless turntables are designed to work seamlessly with Sonos systems. components. Some, like home automation solutions from Crestron and Ikea, can take control of Sonos speakers and components, while other products, like Victrola’s Stream turntable, embed Sonos functionality so that you don’t have to buy additional components. The Stream acts as its own line-in option within the Sonos app.

Normally if you wanted to connect a turntable to your Sonos system, it would require a middleman component like a Sonos Port with its own line-in. To help people identify these products, Sonos created the Works with Sonos label, which you’ll find on product boxes and product websites.

The first step into the Sonos ecosystem can be as low as $120 — the cost of its most affordable speaker, the Ikea-branded Symfonisk Bookshelf Speaker. From there, the sky’s the limit.

You’ll find speakers and components for a variety of room sizes and listening activities, including portable speakers, ceiling-mounted architectural speakers, outdoor speakers, and soundbars, including the $999 Dolby Atmos-capable Sonos Arc Ultra which can be used on its own or with additional Sonos speakers for a full home theater package. The Sonos app is free to download.

Sonos has always made great-sounding speakers. However, if you ask its biggest fans, it’s the company’s software that has traditionally set it apart from the competition. The Sonos app for mobile platforms (Android, iOS) and desktop machines (Windows, MacOS) is a one-stop shop for all your Sonos needs. It helps you set up your new components in seconds, it lets you see and manage every Sonos product in your house, and it can bring together your streaming services and your personal music collection so you don’t have to bounce around from one app to another.

It also gives you granular control over every speaker in your home. You can choose a different song or playlist for each speaker, group several speakers together to play the same content, or synchronize all of the speakers so that the music you’re listening to follows you from room to room.

Digital Trends and many other publications heaped praise on the Sonos app for its simplicity and power. For years, it proved miles better than the alternatives from companies like Denon or Bluesound.

Then May 2024 rolled around and the company launched a massive redesign. In an effort to reduce the number of steps it took for people to find and play music, it removed the tabbed structure folks had become accustomed to, and effectively made the home page an “everything” display.

Far from making things easier, it made them more confusing. But what infuriated customers — and ultimately led to the departure of Sonos’ CEO — was the number of features that had gone missing, and the huge drop in overall system responsiveness and reliability.

Even the app’s universal search, once the best in its class, seemed to have taken a step back in quality.

If there’s one silver lining, it’s that along with the redesign, Sonos launched its first web-based software. Now, anyone with a Sonos account can login to https://play.sonos.com/ and access any of their Sonos systems (handy if you have more than one property) from anywhere in the world.

Speaking of owning more than one Sonos system, in 2020 Sonos announced that some of its older products would stop receiving updates.

If owners of these “legacy” products continued to use them alongside newer Sonos products, they were warned, none of the products would receive planned updates. The initial hope was that these customers would accept a 30% discount on new products for every legacy product they agreed to “trade in.” Except it wasn’t a true trade in program. Instead of having customers send back their legacy gear, Sonos remotely forced them into a recycle mode that rendered them completely unusable, effectively relegating them to the landfill.

This touched off a firestorm of controversy and ultimately caused Sonos CEO Patrick Spence to backtrack on the terms of the trade-in program.

Today, any legacy Sonos products will still work, and Sonos has committed to keeping them operational for as long as possible, but with the following caveats:

To make this work, Sonos split its single control app into two versions: The S1 app is now strictly for legacy products and/or any components that you are fine with not receiving updates. Its functionality will never improve, and in fact, many of its current features may disappear over time. The S2 app is the current Sonos app and it will get all new updates as they are released. Most of Sonos’ newer products only work on the S2 app.

Sonos legacy products include the first-generation Play:5 speaker, the first-generation Connect and Connect:Amp, five versions of the original Zone Player, the Bridge, and the CR200.

From sound sources like vinyl-spinning turntables to CD players, and sound systems like your classic Marantz receiver with vintage Klipsch speakers, Sonos is able to integrate all of these existing components into its wireless, whole-home ecosystem.

To play records, CDs, cassette tapes, or even the sound from a TV through a Sonos system’s speakers, you’ll need a Sonos product that can accept an analog or digital “line-in.” The Port, the Amp, the Five, and both the Era 100 and 300 speakers accept analog sources like turntables, cassette decks, or CD players. For digital sources, the Sonos Amp, Beam Gen 2, and Arc Ultra can accept HDMI or optical connections, while the Ray works with just optical.

Once connected, these sources can be accessed in two ways:

You can also use the Sonos system as a source for any of your amplified or non-amplified speakers.

If you have an AV receiver or a stereo integrated amplifier, you already have a source of amplification for your speakers. In this case, connecting a Sonos Port via its analog or digital outputs will effectively turn your amplified speakers into a Sonos speaker. If you have a set of non-amplified speakers, you can hard-wire them to a Sonos Amp, which has a built-in amplifier that’s powerful enough for up to two pairs of small or large speakers.

Sonos offers the ability to play music from a wide range of sources, including:

If you have a collection of digital music located on a PC, network-attached storage (NAS) drive, or an Android mobile device (for iOS users, see our section on AirPlay 2, below), Sonos can play it, along with any playlists you may have created. The software can also scan and index your iTunes library if that’s how you’ve chosen to organize your music. Supported audio formats include MP3, MP4, M4A, WMA, AAC and HE-AAC, OGG, FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, and WAV.

Sonos also works with external analog and digital audio equipment. This can include a turntable, CD payer, or tape deck, but also your TV, through an optical or HDMI ARC/eARC connection. You’ll need specific Sonos components to make this work (see the How do I get Sonos to work with my existing audio gear? section, above).

Sonos also plays nicely with tons of streaming music services. Here’s just a small selection of compatible options:

In fact, Sonos supports more streaming services than any other multi-room music system. It also offers its own streaming music service called Sonos Radio — in both free and paid tiers — as a homegrown alternative.

To a degree, yes. Sonos can handle lossless music files up to 24-bit/48 kHz, which is better than CD quality, and generally considered hi-res audio. To get this level of quality, your system will need to be running on the S2 version of the Sonos app and your music source will need to support it too.

For music files in your personal library, this means either FLAC or ALAC formats. Uncompressed AIFF and WAV files are also supported, but only up to 16-bit.

Lossy formats, like MP3, MP4, and M4A will all stream at bitrates of up to 320kbps.

When it comes to streaming music services, Sonos is currently compatible with 24-bit/48kHz hi-res audio from Apple Music, Amazon Music and Qobuz, but with one important caveat: If you attempt to stream a hi-res track from these services with a sampling frequency that’s higher than 48kHz (which is quite common — many hi-res tracks are 96 or 192kHz), the entire track will be delivered at lossless 16-bit/44.1kHz CD-quality instead.

Depending on your Sonos product, there are three different ways to stream music.

Despite its ongoing problems, for the best possible audio quality, you should use the Sonos app. Doing so preserves the most amount of detail from your music source, whether it’s jazz from Apple Music or your favorite grunge tracks from your personal library.

The Sonos app acts a kind of remote control, telling each speaker in your system what to play, and where to find it. Because of that, you can begin a music session and then leave the house and the music will play on; it doesn’t need your phone to stick around. Anyone else in your household with the Sonos app can takeover control the music at any time. They can also add to your playlist or replace it with their own.

The second way, is using Apple AirPlay 2. This only applies to Sonos owners who also own Apple devices, and you’ll need an AirPlay 2-compatible Sonos product. Since every Sonos and Ikea Symfonisk device made since 2017 has AirPlay 2, this likely isn’t a big limitation.

AirPlay 2 is very convenient. You hit play in any audio app on your iPhone or iPad, look for the AirPlay icon, then select your Sonos speaker(s) from the list of available devices. And even if you have other Sonos speakers that can’t do AirPlay 2, they can nonetheless share that AirPlay 2 stream if you group them with the AirPlay 2 speaker in the Sonos app. But AirPlay 2 also has two key limitations.

First, it streams all audio using the lossy AAC format at a 256kbps bitrate. For most folks, this is fine, but audiophiles won’t be happy with the lack of fidelity. Second, it needs your device for playback. If you quit your audio app, turn off your phone, or leave the house, the music will stop.

The third option is Bluetooth. All phones have a Bluetooth connection, but only a handful of current Sonos speakers support it: The Arc Ultra, Era 100, Era 300, Roam 2, and Move 2. Bluetooth is just as convenient as AirPlay 2, and more versatile: You can use Bluetooth anywhere, whereas AirPlay 2 requires a home network.

Just like AirPlay, Bluetooth uses a lossy form of compressed audio. Again, you might not be bothered by it — for casual listening, it should be just fine. As with AirPlay 2, Bluetooth requires a constant connection between the speaker and the phone.

Not that we want to downplay the severity of Sonos’ software mishap, after all, it’s now been 8 months since the botched update and many people’s Sonos systems are still experiencing buggy operation. That said, it’s a software problem, not a hardware problem. Eventually, the company will once again have an app that makes using Sonos products as much of a joy as it is to listen to them.

Still, that day isn’t here yet and people are rightly asking whether they should buy Sonos speakers, or even consider selling the ones they own.

Especially now that Sonos’ board has installed a new interim CEO who has a deep history in the streaming music world, we think existing Sonos owners should stay the course. Now’s not a great time to sell used Sonos equipment, and the cost of switching to a competitor could be considerable. Sonos has a proven track record of making consistently great hardware. If it can get back to its roots on the software side, there’s no reason it can’t reclaim its crown.

On the other hand, if you don’t own any Sonos products and you’re looking into whole-home music systems, we encourage you to explore the alternatives. Even before the software update gaffe, many of these companies like Bluesound, Denon, and Wiim had made big strides in narrowing the gap with Sonos and you can expect them to work even harder now to win over Sonos customers.