So I find it faintly bewildering why people are so entranced by Sonos products. £200 for a mono speaker? Yes, Mono. If you want stereo you need two - doubling the cost. And for the price of two of these, you could buy an stereo amp, good quality speakers and a Chromecast audio and still have change from £400. You'd also have something which so far outperforms the Sonos equipment you'd swear the Sonos gear was faulty. The only benefits offered are (they say) is that the Sonos speaker is portable, “I can put it anywhere, so nyeh!” Yes, but do you put it "anywhere"? Of course not, it's sits in the same spot, year in, year out, delivering it's feeble monophonic sound, footered with to the point of oblivion by the digital jiggery pokery Sonos deploy as a workaround in order to give a vague approximation of the stereo sound it's otherwise incapable of playing. But the reviews are good, 5 stars in all the press.
Quite
Many years ago there was a Bose demonstration unit, (supposedly at least) showing how good their Acoustimass speakers sound. You’d stand, listening to what appeared to be two vast floorstanding loudspeakers, then a button would be pressed, the front of the speakers would turn, revealing the truth. Two tiddly satellite speakers and a subwoofer. “Wow” you’d think “that’s incredible sound”. Traditional speakers would always be conspiciously absent from said demonstration rooms. For a damn good reason. In isolation the Bose things sounded great. But then you compared them to a pair of traditional speakers? No chance. For or all the who ha about how incredible these new mono speakers sound and how they seemingly defy the laws of physics and acoustics you have to remember how tightly controlled the demos are. Where only equivalent speakers are demonstrated, not comparable units. Hence the new Apple / Sonos / Google thing sounding “brilliant”.
And of course they do. Okay they don't. On a good day they sound barely comparable to a crap 80s mono cassette player.
The latest “enhancement” isn’t improved sound quality, rather it’s voice recognition. You can now tell the speaker what to play.
Or rather you can’t
You have to preconfigure the software which runs in the background first. Think setting a VCR timer was difficult? Then program the unit to recognise your voice, then repeat yourself several times to said device to get it to play anything. Inevitably it will almost certainly have misinterpreted what you’ve asked it to play and instead cue up The Dead Kennedy’s “Too Drunk to Fuck“.
In glorious mono, at a volume a gnat sneezing would obscure.
Of course Sonos aren’t alone. There is a procession of companies offering voice recognition speakers. Google (god knows), Amazon (Alexa / Dot) and a list of others too depressing to count. To a unit they all suffer from the same flaws as the Sonos offering. They don’t natively support stereo. Of course the herd mentality means that, despite there being no tangible benefit to voice recognition, every manufacturer will feel obligated to support it.
However, given the ample evidence which proves people don’t care what things sound like and that incremental improvements in sound quality really don’t strike a chord with the public, who cares? Manufacturers know this so “gild the lily” by adding something else. In this instance utterly useless voice recognition.
Or put another way; If voice recognition is the future for speakers, as Amazon, Google and others believe, with an infinite array of music at your fingertips, then there’s one thing which proves otherwise
“Alexa. Play music in stereo”
“Bugger”
