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Roon and Sonos

Forgive me for raising a topic that may well have been addressed elsewhere, but I have been dealing with an issue between Roon and Sonos.  I am in the middle of my first year subscription of Roon and liked it enough (so I thought) to purchase the new Roon Nucleus One.  When Roon works, it is wonderful.  However .... in one of my setups primarly designed to stream music through various rooms as background using various Sonos components including a port, a Roam and a number of Sonos speakers, Roon worked until for reasons I can't understand it inexplicably would lose control of the Sonos devices despite the fact that the devices do show up on Roon's audio section. I have tried to work with both Sonos and Roon -- Sonos tech concluded that the problem likely lay with Roon while acknowledging that it doesn't have a "formal" agreement with Roon.  Roon, whose technical service is nigh impossible to navigate and there is never a live person to talk to, Roon always points you to a do-loop of rebooting and rebooting.  I want to use Roon over the Sonos app.   In my main high fidelity system Roon works perfectly with my Eversolo Streamer and Qutest DAC.  I don't know whether it's because in my main location I have almost 1GB of internet where in our more remote summer place (with only Sonos) I have about 400 mbps.  Given the almost $150 a year subscription price, it seems reasonable to believe that Roon should be plug and play, especially when it seems to advertise that Sonos products are Sonos ready. I was especially hopeful that Roon would work because Sonos's spring app rollout was such a failure.  If anyone has a magic bullet, please share it with me!  

bfleetwood
vintageadict
26 posts
 

I spent 2 hours on the phone with Sonos Support last night. The problem is the Connect which was purchased in 2017. It is now considered a legacy product. These product cannot accept many of the updates in the S2 app and actually prevent newer products from receiving updates if they are incorporated in the system. My only option to use the connect is to downgrade to the S1 app. That is what Sonos owners have done to keep their equipment going. For now I will just removed it from the system since it is bricked using S2.  FYI, it was working ok (some issues) before I worked on that system and unplugged it. Once I had everything hooked up again that is when the major problems popped up. 

I do wonder if other similar products will eventually have the same issues. I'll avoid buying speakers, amps etc with wifi connectivity and app control in the future since they seem to have an expiration date as technology evolves. 

bfleetwood OP
20 posts
 

In my case, the "brick" in my wall is the Sonos Roam.  It went from working to totally not working.  When not outside, I pair it with a Sonos One and a Sonos port  that serves an Audiolab receiver and two Ascend Acoustic speakers.  When the Sonos app works, which is not always, it sees each speaker in the series.  Roon sees the Roam but will not play and it loses control of the audio device.  The Roam is not a legacy device; nor is the Amp.  In every case where I have reached out to either Sonos or Roon support, they end up pointing fingers at the other.  Given the prevalence of Sonos in the wireless speaker arena and the fragility of the Sonos App, one would think they might figure something out.  Sadly, I am invested in Sonos for some of my music and wish there was a better more hi resolution solution.  

jgordon101
1 posts
 

I’ve been using Roon for several years and Sonos for about 15 years. With Sonos’ well known recent challenges, the integration of the two has become more challenging… after the upgrade, I regularly received ‘Roon has lost control of this device’ messages and the music, of course, ceased. My solution to this challenge was to shift the control integration from the default ‘protocol’ between Roon and Sonos to Airplay2 in Roon. This seems to resolve the ‘lost control’ issues. I believe this limits sound quality to close to CD (44/16) quality but Sonos is already limited in that regard and my whole house system isn’t capable of resolving that level of resolution. This likely has something to do with ‘Roon certified’ vs. ‘Roon tested’ which is more of a business strategy construct between the companies. Good luck.

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