What scares me is that they are having us get market penetration. We are out selling their product, building their brand and getting it into as many households as possible. I am afraid one day that they will not sell to dealers anymore, and they could only be purchased at Target, Best buy and Sonos.com. Then all of the households that we accumulated over the years are people who love Sonos, and will basically sell Sonos to their friends when they see and listen to their system.

This scares me because Sonos is such a huge chunk of my business. We held a Sonos event at our store last year where we sold several TV's, a Receiver, two URC remotes, and a couple wifi systems. When we added up the total business from the event it was over 20k.

I love Sonos, they are great to me, and I love their product, I just get nervous that one day they will pull the plug on their dealers and go the route of Adcom, Velodyne, etc.....look where those companies are though.

It's ok. I just finally stopped accidentally writing 2012 on everything.

That seems to be the business model of every manufacturer in this industry.  We've seen it time and time again.    Take it from a guy who used to do the majority of his business contracting through Circuit City….don't put all your eggs in one basket.   Act now, so you don't wake up one day and find out that your Goose that lays the golden eggs died. Or in my case, my favorite vendor field BK.  

 

This whole Sonos deal reeks of the DirecTV crap a few years back...


So, you become a Sonos dealer, you become so heavily involved with that one product that when the day comes and you're kicked to the curb, YOUR business takes a massive hit, and Sonos the company cares less.


History repeats....

I like sonos. Used to love them, but can only take so much of their crap marketing and upper level direction of the ship.

This line cries out for custom labeled and designed product lineup for CIs. Similar to Integtra->Onkyo.
Custom software control and maybe some DSP features you can get into from a CI oriented setup program onsite.

If So OS gave us the capability to look at diagnostic reports, customize room groups. So for example a family room with a game table, bar, and sitting are has three zones, but all three would always have the same source. For example permanently group those three zones together, but you could change the volume using the Sonos app. If they focused more on the CI market, they would literally rule the world. I remember reading some where, that Sonos is so far advanced, and the tech is so far ahead of everyone else, someone won't come out with a "Sonos Killer", if Sonos gets killed it will be themselves that screw it up. Or they will sell to Crestron for a huge sum of money.

Signing up 15 house whole per year. Sound like MLM recruitment scheme. Only the different is you get paid for your labor instead of incentive from recruitment.

Those in the upper level of the company probably like to make Bernie Madoff only graduated from Kinder Garden.

So then there is no problem; sell Nuvo. But, if you need or your clients require Sonos one could argue that some Sonos at distributor margin is better than no Sonos at all. You're not retiring on the margin obtained from the dealer cost of these units anyway; well unless you move millions of units. FYI, your local stocking rep may offer "dealer cost" to you...you know, to help their numbers.

Postscript: the key word in MSRP is 'Suggested'. Care to know what we sell a Sonos streaming client for? 550; build your own margin.

I understand the concerns voiced here regarding Sonos and the direction it looks like they are moving in. I just found out a couple of weeks ago on here about the Gold Level plan when I didn't appear on the Sonos dealer page.

Peachtree Audio pulled a similar stunt with me that several others here said happened to them with Velodyne. They used the CI market to build the brand and get market penetration for a few years, then all of the sudden they pull the rug out from under the dealers and start selling direct only.

There is another Sonos alternative on the horizon, though: http://www.simpleaudio.com/

They are going to be released here in the US by the end of the month. The gear looks very nice and has killer sound quality, from what I've been told. They use power-line adapters rather than forming their own wireless mesh network like Sonos does. The gear is more expensive than Sonos, but it might be worth it, considering the margins are higher. The streaming content deals with Rhapsody and TuneIn Radio are already done. The deals with Pandora and a few others are supposed to be done by about April-June of next year.

I think the real test is how slick their interface is compared to Sonos. If it's as good, then I think it will be a winner. I'll be ordering up some pieces to test out side-by-side with the Sonos system in my home. We'll see....

...and if you believe they care about the CI channel in any way I have some waterfront property in Arizona I would like to show you...

When Sonos started up many years ago I was asked to get with them. At the time I was working with a company called Slim Devices. Slim Devices marketed their equipment under the "Squeeze" brand making their money from hardware. The software was all free open source with a very active development community behind them. Eventually they were bought out by Logicon and are now "Logicon Music Systems" (LMS). I do not deal with LMS but still have my multiple squeeze devices (Transporter, Boom box, Receiver), and the current version of the server

Completely Wi-Fi based and supported by apps on the Philips Pronto (I wrote one) and the iPad. The iPad app (not by Logicon) is what I use and it is superb!.

The quality of the sound is based upon what you feed the output of the Squeeze Player device into. Only the Boom Box is a complete system, just plug it in and it plays.

Everything still works, and all control of the players is through the main software that runs on several platforms. They even have an interesting remote to control any player.

You do need the central server, but then again I need some PC like device (NAS) to hold my music library. I understand there is now even a version of the central software that has been ported to a Raspberry-Pi, and there are versions running on MAC, Linux and several NAS systems.

I am glad I never touched Sonos.

Sonos is selling through Telstra stores here (a telephone company). Only found that out when I was there doing a software upgrade on some of their digital signage.

The first Sonos "Killer" to have a full compliment of music services will actually have the capability to make the kill.