When I was twelve my parents built a new house on a hill, which they live in to this day. It was the early 90s. My dad did a lot of the work on the place, allowing him a few luxuries we might not else have been able to afford. The house was big enough that you might have guessed they’d install an intercom, but they were smart - that 1970’s technology was at this point tired and had been revealed as the gimmick it actually was. Instead, he installed speakers in four separate rooms of the house, each connected to a central distributor next to the amplifier, and put an unobtrusive volume knob somewhere on the walls. We might not have had much, but this was luxury, and music was something we cared about.
When I bought my pre-earthquake victorian in San Francisco in the early 2010s, pulling wires was out of the question, but I wanted the same experience. I went big on Sonos gear for all the obvious reasons - great audio quality, wireless connectivity, and the ability to group rooms into zones and have the same song playing in some or all of the house. This felt like magic.
Eight zones: very respectable, with a few stereo pairs and other cool accessories in the mix. I bought a network storage device and had gigabytes of my favorite music a button press away, long before Spotify and Apple Music achieved the Netflix-like domination they’ve arrived at today.
In the years since I’ve repeatedly upgraded my equipment - first to remove the outdated S1 gear that they discontinued support for a few years ago, then a new sound bar for the media room - but the way we use the system also changed. When we got a dog who was very worried about city noises, eight zones turned into eight white noise machines that ran almost 24/7. We’d watch TV in one room or another, but not bother to send the sound throughout the house.
My dog wasn’t the harbinger of doom for my Sonos usage, though: that role belongs to AirPods. My wife and I have very different media consumption habits, and part of reaching equilibrium means that she’s often listening to a podcast, an audio book or a TV show in the comfort of her ears, regardless of what room she’s in. The white noise might even keep playing in the same room. Meanwhile, I might be listening to music at my desk, but transition to my own AirPods as I head out for a run.
Playing music on Sonos in a specific room is a bit like calling a land-line telephone - its endpoint is a specific location, instead of a specific person. There are perfectly great times and places for that: on a Sunday evening while I’m cooking, I love the sound of some old piano jazz playing from across the house while I cook dinner. It’s romantic. There are also plenty of times that you want a great home theater experience. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure the promise of “seamless whole-house audio” is all that exciting outside of some narrow party situations.
So maybe it doesn’t matter whether or not Sonos ultimately fixes its software. Maybe the promise of audio in every room of your house has been solved in ways that are both better and more flexible than any number of speakers can hope to address. Maybe that’s ultimately why Sonos threw away all the brand loyalty they had in order to support some bluetooth headphones. Maybe this is why Apple ultimately didn’t buy them despite all the brand alignment in the world a few years ago: a home intercom, like multi-room audio, is a luxury from a future that’s long past.