
Sonos is getting rid of its controversial “recycle mode” - doener
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/5/21166777/sonos-ending-recycle-mode-trade-up-program-sustainability
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paulhart
For those looking for an alternative solution, I'm currently running Mopidy on
a Raspberry Pi connected to a old Logitech iPod speaker dock that also has an
aux input, and have a music library on a home NAS (Helios4 from kobol.io).

Mopidy acts as a jukebox, streaming files from the server and locally managing
playlists and a queue. It enabled me to reuse my old speakers, put a RasPi to
good use, and offers a responsive web UI to manipulate the queue from our
phones. It was the best low-requirement open source solution I found.

[https://mopidy.com/](https://mopidy.com/)

~~~
wil421
What I want to do is plug multiple pi’s into aux speakers, a pi to Bluetooth
speakers, and then airplay whatever from my iPhone. All the speakers would
play the same thing.

How can I do what you’re doing but with airplay and multiple speakers?

~~~
_asummers
This is why I liked Google Audios. It gave me this exact setup, but they sadly
discontinued manufacturing them.

~~~
tracker1
Didn't realized they stopped making them... love the devices myself, have two
as well as a couple chromecasts, and a couple nvidia shield tv devices. Only
thing missing is a nice home media server interface for them, but I haven't
looked in a while, someone may have one or more now.

70% of the time, I'm on the shield playing video from my nas in kodi... most
of the rest, casting to audio + speakers in the bedroom with rain/storm
sounds.

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amanzi
Good decision by Sonos. Customers can use the trade up program to get a
discount on new gear, and keep using the old gear (or sell it / give it away /
whatever). Obviously a win for customers but this also feels like a win for
Sonos - they get to sell more new gear to existing customers, while
potentially getting new customers buying into the Sonos ecosystem.

~~~
JohnFen
> while potentially getting new customers buying into the Sonos ecosystem.

Perhaps.

While I was unlikely to buy Sonos gear in the first place (because I avoid
purchasing IoT stuff like that), if I were in the market for gear like this I
would certainly not buy Sonos gear now. This step they took was good, but it
doesn't erase the memory of their behavior leading up to this.

~~~
supernovae
As a parent, I can only laugh at this concept... I mean, I don't care what you
buy, but this one strike and your out culture... There wouldn't be a living
human being if we went by that as a society.

~~~
giantrobot
When it comes to a company like Sonos it's not one strike and they're out.
Their whole stupid "recycling" program came from a series of stupid decisions
inside the company and then someone signed off on it! No one got fired for it
so everyone in their decision making tree is still in place, waiting to
strike.

Sonos has a bunch if opportunities to signal they realized they made a mistake
and correct it. Instead they doubled down.

The fact the policy is _still_ in place means they think everything is fine. I
think their policy is stupid and so they're not going to get any of my
dollars.

~~~
pxtail
> Their whole stupid "recycling" program came from a series of stupid
> decisions inside the company and then someone signed off on it!

Moreover in my perception it signals company's predatory and anti-customer
philosophy and I'm convinced that sooner or later they will come up with
similar "clever" idea - only difference will be that next time they will try
to sell it better or just hide it better.

------
dandare
Sonos speakers have beautiful sound but the constant loss of connectivity is a
nightmare. Just few days ago I had to reset the system once again and despite
the fact that I am logged in none of my services and settings are remembered.
I am very dissatisfied with Sonos and I will not buy any of their future
products.

~~~
braythwayt
I had never-ending problems, and it was always, "There's a network issue."
These are speakers, and when I get home from work I'm an audiophile.

I do not want to hook PagerDuty up to my home audio system and manage it like
my home is a NOC, thank you very much. I threw out my Play:1s, and my Play:5s
are now connected by ethernet. They work just fine, but only in the one room
of the house close enough to the router to run CAT5.

At some point, this arrangement will no longer be useful to me, and when it
does, these speakers are on their way to landfill.

I get what Sonos were trying to do, but the experience felt like running a PC
in the 1980s: Too much incidental complexity for an appliance.

I ditched Sonos's software as well, and firewalled the speakers off from
phoning home. I play my audio through Airplay 2, and Life is Fine.

~~~
lostlogin
What brand is your wifi? I’ve seen numerous reports of issues with UniFi and
Sonos, so I went straight to wired. However it seems quite possible that other
vendors could cause problems too. Ubiquiti forums and /r/‘s have ways around
the issue, but I’d prefer wired so didn’t go there.

~~~
jennyyang
I'm 100% Ubiquiti and have not had any problems with my Sonos. I even have my
Sonos across the house from my AP and it's fine.

~~~
lostlogin
I haven’t had problems either and I’m all UniF too. But as the Ubiquiti forums
and reddit subs have numerous stories about problems, I wired them. It seems
that wiring one can solve issues with them all.
[https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-STP-and-
Sonos/7f72d...](https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-STP-and-
Sonos/7f72d9cf-6511-42f6-b6bc-d9b5efb7cb19?page=1)

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ThePowerOfFuet
> When triggered, Recycle Mode would start an irreversible 21-day countdown,
> after which the device in question would cease functioning. Sonos said it
> went this route to ensure that consumer data was being erased on recycled
> products.

What a crock of shit. Credibility? What's that?

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throwaway77384
Oh Sonos, you have caused me so much joy and pain.

I have multiple wifi access points in my (solid brick) house, because nothing
seems to be able to penetrate these walls.

When Sonos works it's great. When it doesn't, I end up spending half an hour
having to reset everything to get my randomly disappearing speakers back.

Some are wired, some are wifi, some are on powerline adapters. It's quite a
hodge-podge, but none of my other devices have any issues with the setup, so
why does Sonos decide to die randomly from time to time?

I've gone through the trouble of switching wifi channels, trialling different
ones, just to see if anything improves the situation, but there is no
regularity in the failures. It either happens, or it doesn't.

I also do not appreciate that Sonos is seemingly all about streaming services.
I wish local NAS playback wasn't treated as second-class citizen...it's the
only way I use Sonos.

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germinalphrase
Man... any good alternatives for adding Sonos multi zone functionality to a
traditional stereo?

~~~
pxlpshr
I may be misunderstanding your question but I'm a big fan of Denon (or
Marantz) receivers w/ HEOS. Their AVR line can support up to 3 zones and can
be paired together. I have 11.2 and 9.2 powering 18x speakers and a sub in my
house. You can use a single receiver to play music outside by our pool and
simultaneously play 5.1 over the living room for sports or movies. It also
handles the connection to Spotify (et al) directly so I can take a call or
leave the house with my phone and the music will continue to play.

~~~
germinalphrase
This is probably the option I would (like to) go for. I just want a stereo
receiver that lets me control all the same “dumb” speakers I own in multiple
rooms from my phone.

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ubermonkey
It's a good move, but honestly they're moving in a direction that is less
interesting to me.

Ten years ago, Sonos was the sine qua non of easy home audio, becuase they
were ahead of the game on interface AND gave you a great way to access your
music library anywhere in your house. The extra bonus feature was their usage
of a proprietary mesh network, so the music didn't stream over your
increasingly-overburdened regular wifi network.

Well, most of those advantages have kinda gone away. Moving in reverse:

\- wifi is way better now; I never have dropouts anymore.

\- The Sonos interface is now way, way, way behind the Apple music interface
IMO. My nontechnical wife never warmed to Sonos at all, but she can use iTunes
on her phone with aplomb, and playing music in the living room uses the same
interface as playing music on her headphones.

\- Library access was a sticking point, given that Apple formerly relied on a
convoluted approach here, but by subscribing to Apple Music the problem is
completely sidestepped. I pay for this mostly so I don't ever have to plug my
phone into the media box and sync files -- for me or for my wife. That's worth
the price right there, to be honest, but in addition to that you get access to
nearly anything. It's rare I can't find what I want there. (We DO still buy
CDs locally, but only because we live in a place with a real indie record
store.)

The tl;dr is that we were already kind of Done with Sonos when this whole
kerfluffle started -- we have sunk costs here, but as these devices stop
functioning we'll move to something else that plugs into the Apple
infrastructure better. Even if we have to revert to local music only due to
some Apple failure, there are still better/easier options than Sonos at this
point.

~~~
ssully
I just got a Sonos beam a few months since it seemed like a decent soundbar
for the price. I also use Apple music and I just airplay music to my Beam.
Does that not work as well when you have a multi-speaker setup?

~~~
rconti
Sonos AirPlay devices are pretty new. Supposedly you only need one, and it can
stream to all their devices, but the devices form a cluster, and I'm not sure
how intelligent they are about making sure the device that can airplay is the
device that's always the master.

------
dang
Recent and related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086)

Also
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E10%20Sonos&sort=byDate&type=story)

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ornornor
How do you unbrick the ones already in “recycling” mode? Or is it too late for
these and they’re now landfill fodder?

------
JohnFen
I'm pleased that Sonos was convinced to stop doing the obviously terrible
thing that it was doing.

------
_Understated_
Edit: earlier comment was full of shit :)

What's with companies dictating what we can do with our stuff when it's EoL?

People who buy this shit: Stop buying it and they'll stop forcing it on us!

Please... just stop.

~~~
0xdeadb00f
Most of their customers probably couldn't care less, or don't know any better.
It's likely the majority of their customers will still buy this shit,
regardless.

------
Reubachi
HOLY MOLY

NSFW tag, my friend.

------
fierarul
I think Sonos did the right thing by _creating_ Recycle Mode and the over-
reaction to this was amazing.

Telling customers to just send the bricked device to the local recycling
centre in exchange for a discount seems fair.

Apple also has a trade-in program except they expect you to send them the
device. Sonos took the cheaper approach by offloading the actual recycling to
a local centre. But people want to have it both/all three ways: feel good
about recycling, get a discount on a future new gadget _and_ sell/give the
functioning old device to somebody. Amazing.

~~~
gambiting
>>Telling customers to just send the bricked device to the local recycling
centre in exchange for a discount seems fair.

No, that's literally insane by every definition of the word. They took
perfectly fine, working products, and destroyed them in order to give their
customers a discount. Which part of that seems "fair" to you? Imagine if a car
manufacturer would give you a discount on a new car, if you took your old one
to the scrapyard first - everyone would immediately how this is a huge waste
of resources if the car was still working. How is this acceptable with
speakers??

Other companies somehow manage without this madness fine - if you are verified
as an actual customer, they give you a discount for more stuff. What usually
happens then is that you either sell or give away the old device, and someone
else might get into the brand and potentially purchase more devices from it as
well. It's a win win for everyone. This stupid recycling thing serves no one,
except like you said - people feeling "good" about recycling, which is
nonsense, a fully working device should be reused first.

~~~
derekp7
That was almost exactly what the Cash for Clunkers program was doing. Under
the Gov. contact, the dealer had to pour an engine seizing compound through
the caurborator to get the discount reimbursement. Kept functional vehicles
from ending up in the hands of the poor.

~~~
Angostura
That's because it was designed _specifically_ to remove more environmentally
damaging vehicles from being used. It's purpose was to give people incentives
to get them destroyed.

There is no similar environmental incentive here.

~~~
sitkack
The purpose was to prop up the auto industry while having an eco cover story.

