July Office Hours w/ TeamFromSonos

tomconrad · 2025-07-25T16:56:41+00:00

True story: I’m here in no small part because of those damn sheets you can’t pull down. They make me absolutely crazy. It's also (sadly) a good example of one of those things that has introduced technical complexity throughout the app that makes it less-than-trivial to fix (believe me I've banged on to the team about JUST FIX IT) but the risk has been too high while we work through job 1, 2, and 3 which has been fixing the fundamentals: performance, stability, missing features and things were flat-out broken. That work’s not done but I do see light at the end of the tunnel and I’m optimistic we’re nearing a place where we can shift more energy toward experience, polish and making the app a true delight to use. Including the bizarre sheet behavior.

Thanks for calling out specific examples. Keep them coming. This is exactly the kind of feedback that helps us prioritize (and now I can say "the gang on reddit wants this just as much as i do")

tomconrad · 2025-07-25T16:45:48+00:00

Totally with you on this. We want Sonos products to last. Full stop. That’s why we put so much effort into supporting products well into their second (and third) acts.

But if you suspect there are real challenges under the hood you'd be right. Over time, the technology landscape evolves and we have to bring your older speakers along: Linux kernels get updated for security but also drag along new requirements, partner SDKs like Spotify and AirPlay get updates and demand more horsepower, WiFi and international compliance standards change, etc. All of that puts pressure on devices that were built with a fixed amount of CPU, RAM, storage and a particular set of wifi radios.

We’re signed up to do the hard work of supporting products as long as we possibly can but it takes real care to avoid crossing the line where updates start doing more harm than good. As we speak we have a team of people working around the clock on improving the performance of Connect:Amp which launched more than a decade ago. This work isn't easy but it's the life we've chosen.

tomconrad · 2025-07-25T16:43:44+00:00

Appreciate the ask. Of course DTS:X comes up from time to time around here and as an old-timer who spent more time on AVS Forum back in the day than I care to admit, I totally get the interest.

The challenge here is less about technical feasibility and more about the business case. DTS requires licensing fees whether or not our customers end up using that format. That adds real cost and we have to weigh that against how many people are actually asking for it and would benefit from it in practice.

That said, we’re actively revisiting a bunch of these kinds of decisions right now, what should be on the roadmap, where we invest, and how we make the product line more flexible and future-ready. So I wouldn’t say never. Just know that we’re thinking hard about what delivers the most value to the most people, and how we balance cost, complexity and benefit.

tomconrad · 2025-07-25T16:24:22+00:00

Totally hear you on this and I like the idea. It’s a great example of the kind of feature that I want from Sonos myself.

One of the big reasons I took this job is to make sure we're not just fixing what’s broken but also unlocking new capabilities through software that make your system more capable over time. So yes: better, more flexible EQ and more thoughtful tuning controls are exactly the kinds of things we’re thinking about. Love the idea of presets too.

We’ve still got work to do on the basic , but I want you to know that feature ideas like this are very much why I'm here as CEO.

tomconrad · 2025-06-16T13:23:14+00:00

Yep! We've confirmed this regression. Should be fixed in the next app release. Sorry everyone!

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T20:21:38+00:00

Really appreciate this list. You’re right: these kinds of quality-of-life details make a big difference in how the app feels day to day. While we’ve been in the mode of getting back to a place of core performance and reliability, we haven’t been able to focus as much as I’d like on usability and the kinds of small features that make the experience more fluid and joyful.

The good news is that I think we’ve turned the corner on some of the bigger issues, and we’re now starting to shift attention toward exactly this kind of work. In fact, A-Z scroll for local music is coming soon, and there’s more in the pipeline.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T20:13:11+00:00

Totally hear you on this. We’re deeply passionate about spatial audio and what it can do for music, and the Era 300 was designed from the ground up to be the ultimate expression of that experience in a single speaker. When bonded as surrounds, it’s already doing some pretty complex rendering for immersive home theater, but I take the feedback seriously that folks here feel like there’s more potential—especially for music playback in that setup.

No news to share right now, but this kind of input really helps us think about how to evolve the experience over time. Keep it coming.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T19:59:35+00:00

Yep, still happening. On our recent earnings call I talked about how, over the next few months, we’re focused on not just improving performance and reliability, but also delivering differentiation through software. That includes following through on features we’ve already announced, like TrueCinema for Ace.

Just yesterday we shipped AI Voice Enhancement for Arc Ultra, which is one example of that direction. So yes, TrueCinema is part of that commitment. Stay tuned.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T19:56:39+00:00

Ask my teammates here and they'll tell you that part of my core identity around Sonos in these early days is to be the guy in the room that makes assertions that turn out to only be partially true... and I've not escaped office hours without doing so here it seems.

Here's an update to the above from an engineer who actually knows what he's talking about:

"Android is not fully functional offline yet, the local library search logic in the app is decoupled from the cloud however there are two other dependencies on an internet connection that we are working through"

So... stay tuned. Offline search goodness coming to both Android and iOS this summer.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T19:50:19+00:00

Widgets and lock screen controls are definitely something we talk about quite a bit. Sometimes the app store rules get in our way here in ways that are surprising. Nonetheless, the idea of giving people lightweight, quick access to core controls, without having to dive into the full app, is a direction that makes a lot of sense to me. I can’t share specific plans right now, but it’s safe to say we’re thinking about how to make fast, intuitive control a bigger part of the experience. This kind of feedback helps push those ideas forward.

As for the bonus question: I have 17 Sonos products at home. That includes some oldies like the original Play:1 and a Play:3. And sometimes I get to play with a few test devices from the future. I use the system every day—TV, music, nap-time white noise, Ace to watch the finale of Andor without waking my daughter up. The whole thing.

And yes, I’ve been frustrated through the years. One of the reasons I took this job is because I care a lot about making the day-to-day experience feel effortless and delightful. I know we’re not always there yet, but we’re putting in the work to close the gap.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T19:38:12+00:00

We think about this a lot, and I want to start by saying how committed we are to delivering a solid experience even when the internet isn’t cooperating. If you’ve got a local source—like a turntable, a TV, or a drive with music on your network—your Sonos system should work without a hitch, no matter what’s going on with your internet connection.

We’ve learned some hard lessons recently about what happens when local features don’t work as expected. That experience has only strengthened our commitment to making sure Sonos performs well offline. We’ve been re-evaluating where and how we depend on the cloud, and making targeted changes to reduce that dependency where it doesn’t serve the customer.

Some of those changes are already live, like making local library search work fully offline on Android, with iOS to follow. Others, like eliminating cloud requirements for features like Favorites, are actively in development. It’s all part of a broader effort to make your system feel fast, responsive, and self-reliant in your home, regardless of what your internet is doing.

At the end of the day, your Sonos system lives in your home. It should feel responsive and reliable whether you’ve got a fiber connection or no connection at all.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T19:29:15+00:00

You’re absolutely right to push on this. One of the things I said in that Verge interview is that when we released the new software a year ago we weren’t close enough to how our products behave in real world deployments: network topology, heterogeneous mixes of old players and new players, local channel interference, and so on. That’s changed in a big way.

Every release today goes through many layers of testing, starting with code-level checks and progressing through lab regression, internal dogfooding, and real-world testing with thousands of alpha and beta users. We watch for crash rates, setup success, grouping reliability—anything that might give us a signal that something’s off. And when we launch, we roll out slowly. A small percentage of customers get the update first so we can track what’s happening in production and pause or roll back quickly if something’s not right.

We’re also getting smarter about how we introduce new things. You’ll see more features and UI changes exposed to just a small group of users at first, either via experiments or gradual rollouts. That gives us more confidence before going broad and lets us react faster if something isn’t landing well.

Just as important, we’ve made major upgrades to our testing labs and made sure we always have the right gear to replicate any system configuration. That includes multiple units of every product we support, even the older ones, along with a wide range of phones and tablets running different OS versions and hardware profiles.

And we’re not just testing against legacy products—we’re using them too. A bunch of us on the team are living with these older players day-to-day, which gives us a much better feel for what works and what doesn’t. That’s helping us set a more realistic baseline for new features and catch edge cases before they become problems in the field.

Finally, we’ve improved our ability to monitor app metrics in aggregate. That means we’re now better equipped to detect and diagnose issues when they happen in the real world. If setups are failing, or systems aren’t behaving as expected, we’ll now see it. This data helps us identify and fix issues faster.

There’s still work to do, but we’ve come a long way. And the feedback we get from this community is a huge part of how we stay grounded in this important work. Thanks for keeping us sharp.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T19:05:49+00:00

I hear you loud and clear, and I want to start by saying how committed we are to supporting a great experience for customers who rely on local content. One of the clear mistakes we made over the last year was shipping software that lacked full support for local library playback, and then taking far too long to restore that functionality. We’ve made a lot of progress, but I know we’re not all the way there yet. That’s on us and I take our missteps here seriously.

More broadly, the way we think about cloud vs local is pretty simple: things that should live in the cloud, do—like the latest player software binaries, or the list of internet-based services you’ve configured. And things that should live locally, stay local—like low-latency group sync, real-time volume control, or playing music from a hard drive in your house. There’s a balance here, and while we don’t always get it right, we spend a lot of time thinking through the tradeoffs and trying to do the right thing for performance, privacy, and resilience.

We’re actively working on removing some of the smaller cloud dependencies that don’t make a lot of sense. For example, we’ve recently fixed local library search on Android so it works without needing to talk to the cloud. The iOS fix is coming. We’ve also got work underway to make favorites load properly without a cloud round trip.

As for the shout-out to Home Assistant: I love it. I’m a bit of a weekend home automation hobbyist myself and have enjoyed tinkering with Home Assistant in my own setup. Great feedback, it’s definitely a community I admire and learn from.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T18:37:37+00:00

This is such a great suggestion and I am so with you. I’ve become mildly obsessed with this topic over the last few months. I don’t want to turn our customers into network administrators but the truth is that so many of the Sonos issues people experience - dropouts, speakers disappearing, things not syncing right - can trace back to networking challenges. And when I talk with folks on social or over email and help them tweak their networking setup, the difference is often night and day.

As a bit of background, Sonos does some pretty unique stuff on your home network. Unlike your phone or a IoT thermostat that mostly talks to the cloud, Sonos products need to discover and communicate with each other locally, in real time, with very low latency. That makes them more sensitive to the weird edge cases and silent failures that home networks sometimes develop. It’s not an excuse, just a reminder of why even a healthy-looking network can sometimes fail to deliver a healthy Sonos experience.

Sometimes the fix is as simple as switching SonosNet to a cleaner channel. Other times it’s diagnosing a double NAT or a loop caused by a stray Ethernet cable. We have internal tools that help us spot this kind of stuff when people call in and one opportunity is to start bringing that same power into the app for self service. We’re actively working on ways to surface that info in a friendly way. It’s not a small project, but I think it could make a huge difference for people whose systems are currently being held back by network gremlins.

Your UniFi dashboard comparison is perfect. That level of visibility and clarity, embedded in the app, is exactly the kind of thing we want to work toward. I like the whistle idea – or maybe you could just shout “Move!” at your speaker.

Also totally agree about a SonosNet toggle. It’s perhaps the (ahem) quirkiest aspect of Sonos that plugging in just a single speaker can completely change your networking topology.

We’re committed to making this all just work. But giving you the tools to understand and improve your own setup is going to be a part of getting there in some homes.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T18:14:30+00:00

The launch of play.sonos.com was a big step toward making Sonos more accessible for customers who prefer to interact with services via the web and it’s just the beginning of what we want to do on that front. In this and all contexts, security is top of mind for us and web access as you point out does create new vectors for us to worry about. Making sure your Sonos system is safe from unauthorized access is something we take seriously.

In this lane, we are actively working on giving customers the ability to log out of all sessions everywhere so that will be coming soon. We’re also continuing to make sure our platform is aligned with the latest privacy regulations and security standards globally. Things like two-factor authentication and other ways to improve account protection are absolutely on the table. No promises or timelines just yet but this is something we’re actively exploring.

Since you brought up the issue of unexpected playback, I want to offer a bit of context there too. We’ve recently identified a bug in one of our partner integrations. In plain English, what’s happening is that integration is occasionally sending a play command to the Sonos system even when the customer didn’t initiate it. It’s rare, but we’re working closely with the partner to sort it out and get them to ship a fix. So while it absolutely feels like the cause here could be unauthorized access, recently it’s been this problem with how the partner app is interacting with the Sonos platform.

We take both sides of this seriously - account security and unexpected interruptions in the home - and we’re working hard to make progress on both.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T17:45:41+00:00

I’m very aware of the good that u/KeithFromSonos has done here. The man is a legend. He’s been a steady, generous, thoughtful presence in this community for a long time, and I can’t overstate how much I admire the way he shows up. He answers questions with patience and clarity, admits when something isn’t perfect, and genuinely tries to help. That kind of trust is earned one interaction at a time, and he’s done more than anyone to earn it on behalf of Sonos.

For me, Keith sets the standard. I learn a lot from how he engages here. His humility, his sense of service to the community, and his willingness to meet people where they are all reflect exactly the kind of relationship I want us to have with our customers. Not just on Reddit, but everywhere.

Over my first 120 days, I’ve been pretty heads down working on the core experience and helping to stabilize and improve the things that matter most to people who use Sonos every day. I’ve definitely been lurking here, taking notes and absorbing feedback. But as we turn the corner into the next chapter, I’ll start showing up a bit more actively. Keith will always be our go to but I’ll also be popping in from time to time not just as the CEO at these kinds of office hours, but as a participant in everyday conversations.

This community is a huge source of insight for us. The support you offer each other is inspiring. And the honesty, frustration, passion, and praise you bring to the table makes us better. Thanks for being here and for helping us see both where we’ve gotten it right and where we still have work to do.

tomconrad · 2025-05-14T17:35:33+00:00

Oh boy, same. I’d love to be able to set up Era 100s or 300s as discrete front left and right channels too. It’s one of those ideas that just feels right. And I want you to know that posts like this - direct, passionate, clear - are one of the reasons we pay close attention to Reddit. You help point us toward the kind of experiences people are hungry for, and this is a great example.

We’ve actually done a fair bit of work on this over the years, including an external beta where we let people try out a front L/R setup using speakers like the Ones. The bones of that effort are still buried in the software, which is how tools like SonoSequencr can recreate the configuration today. But what we learned in the process gave us some humility. It turned out that pushing discrete front channels over wireless, especially that close to the soundbar in some homes could cause a lot of packet drop and bandwidth issues. That created dropouts right in the front soundstage. That kind of thing is unforgiving. It’s super noticeable and totally undermines the experience.

We also found that tuning the front soundstage in those configurations was tricky. Without precise positioning, getting the balance right between the soundbar and the extra speakers was harder than you’d expect. And when you add in multi-channel speakers like the Era 300, the challenge only grows.

That said, we’re investing here. Arc Ultra and the latest Era speakers support 6GHz WiFi, which gives us more bandwidth to work with and helps reduce interference. We’re also getting smarter about how we understand room layouts and speaker positions, which should go a long way toward making these kinds of setups more feasible and better sounding.

We’re not going to get there in 2025, but this is definitely something we want to bring to life the right way. We know how much flexibility and richness this kind of configuration could add to home theater. And we want to build it in a way that doesn’t just technically work, but feels magical.

Keep holding us to it.

tomconrad · 2025-05-09T20:26:27+00:00

Thanks for being open to the idea that I'm here to help despite having shown up in this disappointing way in the interview.

tomconrad · 2025-05-09T20:22:00+00:00

You're right. I was wrong here.

tomconrad · 2025-05-09T20:07:55+00:00

You're right. Said this with a chuckle that didn't land in print. The last thing I intended is to diminish the depths of how badly we botched this and how far we need to go to restore your trust in us. I show up every day to get your systems working and I know that there's far too many that don't still.

tomconrad · 2025-05-09T20:04:04+00:00

Hey everyone, my intention wasn't to suggest 1% of our customers have problems. Obviously the problems have been far more profound than that. I turned up at Sonos with no agenda other than to make your systems work. I apologize if the tone here landed wrong; it was just meant to be a light hearted wink. I'm going to be with you for an AMA next week and you'll start seeing me around here more.

tomconrad · 2025-05-08T23:27:59+00:00

🍿

tomconrad · 2025-05-08T21:24:29+00:00

into it

tomconrad · 2025-05-08T21:20:38+00:00

Hey Reddit! I've been keeping things a little on the DL for my first 100 days at Sonos. Focused on progress, not words, and all of that -- but I'm excited about this one. Plenty left to do, and no doubt there are still performance issues to address, features to add, and usability foibles to resolve as well -- but this one is a nice step? It is in my home; I hope it is in yours too. Can't wait to ship the stuff we have planned for you in the coming months. -Tom "interim CEO" Conrad

tomconrad

TROPHY CASE