Home Tech Sonos’ ‘Ultimate’ Home Theater System Requires a Lot of Effort

Sonos’ ‘Ultimate’ Home Theater System Requires a Lot of Effort

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Oval shaped speaker on a black table

It was at this point that my very excited husband became much less enthusiastic. “He decided to let me handle it.” Fair enough, since this is my job, but not the attitude one would expect from someone who had hailed all those boxes as a miracle just weeks earlier.

Side note: To factory reset a Sonos speaker, you need to unplug the power cord, then press and hold the Bluetooth button while plugging the power cord back in, then hold the Bluetooth button until the light on the front flashes orange and white. I had to do this several times with each speaker, and I also did it while on the phone with Sonos support.

“I have one complaint,” I said. At this point, I was balancing the Sonos subwoofer on my lap in a corner, holding the Bluetooth button on the front side of the subwoofer with my left hand, while fumbling with the plug on the bottom with my right hand. “I don’t think the factory reset method needs to be that difficult.”

“Ideally, the customer wouldn’t have to do this so often,” he said softly.

The final straw came when, after weeks of tweaking, everything was up and running. There was just one more thing left for me to test, which is that when you add the Sonos Ace headphones to your app, you can activate TV Audio Swap, meaning you can listen to the TV audio on your Sonos Ace headphones without disturbing anyone else in the room.

I turned on the Ace (factory resetting it, of course, because my app couldn’t find the headphones on the first two attempts). Then I clicked on Settings in the app and on the Ace headphones. I couldn’t find the option to swap audio. When I double-checked the instructions, I realized, to my horror, that TV Audio Swap only works with the Ace headphones. Sonos App for iOS.

After weeks of playing, I couldn’t bear the prospect of resetting everything to factory settings just yet. again to reproduce the same mess on my iPhone. Sorry for those who want to know about audio sharing: I sat down to write this.

Give me some

The Sonos speakers work really well. When I finally got the whole package set up and started playing Sabrina Carpenter in the living room, my 7-year-old ran in and started dancing. If you’re used to listening to tinny TV speakers or propping a small Bluetooth speaker on the sink while you wash dishes, the room-filling sound from a full home theater system is mind-blowing.

Mad Max: Fury Road It’s one of my all-time favorite movies. I’ve seen it three times in the theater, and testing a home theater sound system is a convenient excuse to watch it again and again. I wouldn’t have believed how well the Sonos system was able to replicate the experience with Dolby Atmos.

Photography: Adrienne So

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