Might be same product category, but you need to lay off your crack pipe if you think Sonos is the same type of company as a Yamaha or Denon.

I went to the initial Musiccast roll out. They had no stand alone amp or pre-amp, their speakers were their main focus and they had Musiccast built into their receivers. When asked about "connect" type devices, they were pretty caught off guard and those products weren't released til months later. Everything at the roll out seemed like it was made for direct to consumer.

I think Musiccast would like to be like Sonos, they just don't execute as well. Yamaha is obviously a very big company.

MusicCast has matured significantly since then.

I believe there's well over 100 SKU's released that are MusicCast compatible in the last 3 years... so there should be something to suit.
See below -


[Link: usa.yamaha.com]

[Link: usa.yamaha.com]

Wish Yamaha would add Amazon Music.

It's good that they've reconsidered or at least broadened their target market. All of their stand alone amps and pre-amps look great.

My customers all seem to use either Spotify or Apple Music. MusicCast isn't a good solution for either, even Amazon might work.
Alot of music downloaded on phones is grayed out and unplayable on MusicCast, thankfully these people aren't familiar with Sonos or this would be much harder to explain.
Neither company is perfect, I would hate to have my customer go over to their brother-in-laws house and have him do something I told him wasn't possible though, like play songs downloaded on his phone or Spotify in more than 1 room.

Apple Music would be a great addition to pretty much every streaming product... I can only assume the delay is at Apple's end? What with the number of Apple Music subscribers out there?
Personally, I have high-res AIFF files (about 30GB) on my iPhone and barely anything plays on Sonos, I would have to convert all my files... so that's a no.
There's no longer 'one answer' and 'one product' for all customers, it's a case of choosing the best tool for the job, and of course choosing a product that makes you profit.

I hate how Musiccast can only do spotiy connect and the user has two use to apps to search music and control volumes in zones. Apple music is the same...Airplay only. It's not even Airplay 2 compatible, which would make it easier to stream to multiple rooms from an iPhone.

I wish someone out there would design a system allowing Apple Music and Spotify (the two most popular music services) to be controlled within their app so I wouldnt have to tell old low tech, confused customers to have to use more than one app to control things. It would only take a couple of months to figure it out Im sure.

Spotify was, by all accounts, set to roll out integrated Spotify to manufacturers a few years ago, but then they moved towards 'control the whole process' school of thought.
This meant that the only people with it built in, Sonos, continued to be the only ones with it built in! Then again, when that was the case there were people complaining about not being able to use Sonos Connect with their speakers.
Now that you CAN do this, you've got people complaining that Spotify doesn't work with Alexa in the way they believe it should.
You can't please everyone all the time... for manufacturers it's a moving target and often they're standing in quick sand.

All this whining about having to use more than one app to accomplish a task like playing a song from some overpriced subscription streaming service... sounds like a bunch of squawking hens when there's a snake near the hen house. lol

People are busy, man! They don't have time to deal with multiple phone apps in order to listen to their music!

The fact that so many people need to use Alexa to play their music should tell you that. :D

I can honestly say I don't know of any of our clients using Alexa, Siri or any other spying devices.

Their new interface is cloud based, surprise. And, like a lot of such, it's not automation system friendly in terms of what's required to set up the connection (uses OAuth2 which is really phone app oriented, not driver interface oriented.)

I complained about the coming cloudiness on their forum, explaining to them that that it is not really integration friendly. The guy gave me an example of why it was good: that they could force out upgrades.

Of course the previous thing I'd complained about earlier that day is that a forced upgrade had broken our UPnP driver, and the users couldn't stop it or roll it back. I pointed out that what installers and automation system vendors want is consistency and robustness, and that forced updates are anathema to that.

I doubt seriously that they even consulted a single automation system vendor before making their decision on their new API. I don't think they really care about the automation world anymore. They are on the road to the mass market and are going to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. Once you go public, you have to flog the profit horse constantly or you are in trouble.

It would make sense that Sonos had to come up with an account login finally. How else are you supposed to link the Sonos skill to you Alexa app? Amazon forces you to link whatever skill your adding to that skills’ login info.

BTW, does Heos require logins? Does Heos support Alexa?Does MusicCast support Alexa?

HEOS only requires the app to log in one time then stores the info. Sonos makes you sign in with the password each time you want to add a device.