5 ms·

Might be good to read the patents before posting this comment. The patents in the suit are far, far more detailed than Inc's throwaway one-line description in t

by Bud 5y ago

Might be good to read the patents before posting this comment. The patents in the suit are far, far more detailed than Inc's throwaway one-line description in this article. Sonos' tech here also involves seamless automatic wireless setup and automatically assessing relative speaker volume for a given space, and all kinds of other things. If you've set up a group of Sonos speakers, versus any of the competitors, you know how much better their tech is. It's not merely "ability to connect speakers in groups". Inc just did a terrible job here.

mattmcknight 5y ago
If the patent didn't cover adjusting the volume for a group of speakers, why did Google have to disable it? While the patent portfolio did include other things, Google is being forced to disable the basic, obvious feature.
- zaarn 5y ago
  Google is not being forced to disable this feature, Google decided to. They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature like they did, after all.
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    > They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature That's an assumption. You don't know how much Sonos was asking. In addition, companies can choose to not license a patent to their competitors.
    - zaarn 5y ago
      No that's not the problem. Google already implemented the feature and made money of it. They do owe royalties to Sonos.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  The patents did cover controlling volume across the group, but there was more to it (see the 5 patents linked elsewhere in this discussion).
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    I know there was "more to it", but this claim of the patent could have been invalidated. It seems like the court's interpretation is that Sonos owns the entire process of grouping speakers and changing the volume for that group, which is a very obvious claim.
davweb 5y ago
One the relevant patents [1] does just appear to be describing connecting speakers in a group. [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en
- Bud 5y ago
  - mgoetzke 5y ago
    How can this be patentable ? Is amazing. If given the typical job of implementing this coarse desire of a spec to 100 engineers and 90 can implement it with no problem then its just work, nothing original about it. This company was only the first to actually want to sell 2+ speakers and implement the app control with it instead of an IR remote.
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    These are not "more complex details", it's using more words to say the same thing. It has nothing to do with implementation at all- just a group of speakers playing the same sound source can have their volume adjusted as a group. Given that, I wonder why the court decided that playing a sound on a group of speakers (the first part of your quote) is allowed, but changing the volume across the group is not. It seems quite arbitrary.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I've had to set up Sonos equipment in our corporate network (because President gonna President) and frankly I wasn't that impressed. I imagine it works a lot better for home users, but here I had to downgrade WPA3 to WPA2 to get them to see each other on the network, you have to use an IGMP proxy if you want a client to be able to connect from a different VLAN, and things get very confused if you have two different versions set up (because older hardware isn't supported on the newer versions).
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Those all sound like things that would be rarely encountered in a typical home installation. I have a few older Sonos One speakers (the OG version) and the setup was trivial for our use case (background music in kitchen, bedroom, and living room). At the time (~5 years ago), they were the clear market leader, both in audio quality and ease-of-use. I did consider swapping them out for the first HomePod, but price put me off. Apple has since discontinued in favor of the Mini - I need to check them out and see if the audio quality is remotely comparable before making any change.
- Bud 5y ago
  I agree with you about this part. I do general IT support and have had to set up one of my clients with a large number of Sonos speakers in their office. It was a pain and the tech doesn't seem to be as good of a match for corporate networks. Has worked incredibly well in my home, though.
s1mon 5y ago
The synchronization of multiple zones is definitely non-trivial. Many years ago I had a few Apple Airport Expresses which had audio out. In theory you could use Airplay with these to do much the same thing as Sonos for a lot cheaper. In a one-bedroom apartment, we have 3 zones (bedroom, living room, kitchen) which are all close enough that there's a lot of opportunities to hear sound from 2 or 3 systems at the same time. With Apple it was never in sync. Small delays make the sound miserable. I finally bit the bullet and bought 3 Sonos units. They just work when it comes to the sync. There are other aspects which made Sonos far superior to just using Apple's Airplay and iTunes, but those are not covered in the patents in question. My assumption is that if getting 3 devices to stay in sync - with what I assume is UDP streams and WiFi latency hiccups - was easy or even somewhat difficult, Apple would have been able to solve it. But they couldn't. There must be some special sauce here that Sonos developed and patented.

by Bud 5y ago

mattmcknight 5y ago

If the patent didn't cover adjusting the volume for a group of speakers, why did Google have to disable it? While the patent portfolio did include other things, Google is being forced to disable the basic, obvious feature.

zaarn 5y ago
Google is not being forced to disable this feature, Google decided to. They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature like they did, after all.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  > They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature That's an assumption. You don't know how much Sonos was asking. In addition, companies can choose to not license a patent to their competitors.
  - zaarn 5y ago
    No that's not the problem. Google already implemented the feature and made money of it. They do owe royalties to Sonos.
alistairSH 5y ago
The patents did cover controlling volume across the group, but there was more to it (see the 5 patents linked elsewhere in this discussion).
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  I know there was "more to it", but this claim of the patent could have been invalidated. It seems like the court's interpretation is that Sonos owns the entire process of grouping speakers and changing the volume for that group, which is a very obvious claim.

davweb 5y ago

One the relevant patents [1] does just appear to be describing connecting speakers in a group. [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

Bud 5y ago
- mgoetzke 5y ago
  How can this be patentable ? Is amazing. If given the typical job of implementing this coarse desire of a spec to 100 engineers and 90 can implement it with no problem then its just work, nothing original about it. This company was only the first to actually want to sell 2+ speakers and implement the app control with it instead of an IR remote.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  These are not "more complex details", it's using more words to say the same thing. It has nothing to do with implementation at all- just a group of speakers playing the same sound source can have their volume adjusted as a group. Given that, I wonder why the court decided that playing a sound on a group of speakers (the first part of your quote) is allowed, but changing the volume across the group is not. It seems quite arbitrary.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I've had to set up Sonos equipment in our corporate network (because President gonna President) and frankly I wasn't that impressed. I imagine it works a lot better for home users, but here I had to downgrade WPA3 to WPA2 to get them to see each other on the network, you have to use an IGMP proxy if you want a client to be able to connect from a different VLAN, and things get very confused if you have two different versions set up (because older hardware isn't supported on the newer versions).

alistairSH 5y ago
Those all sound like things that would be rarely encountered in a typical home installation. I have a few older Sonos One speakers (the OG version) and the setup was trivial for our use case (background music in kitchen, bedroom, and living room). At the time (~5 years ago), they were the clear market leader, both in audio quality and ease-of-use. I did consider swapping them out for the first HomePod, but price put me off. Apple has since discontinued in favor of the Mini - I need to check them out and see if the audio quality is remotely comparable before making any change.
Bud 5y ago
I agree with you about this part. I do general IT support and have had to set up one of my clients with a large number of Sonos speakers in their office. It was a pain and the tech doesn't seem to be as good of a match for corporate networks. Has worked incredibly well in my home, though.

s1mon 5y ago

The synchronization of multiple zones is definitely non-trivial. Many years ago I had a few Apple Airport Expresses which had audio out. In theory you could use Airplay with these to do much the same thing as Sonos for a lot cheaper. In a one-bedroom apartment, we have 3 zones (bedroom, living room, kitchen) which are all close enough that there's a lot of opportunities to hear sound from 2 or 3 systems at the same time. With Apple it was never in sync. Small delays make the sound miserable. I finally bit the bullet and bought 3 Sonos units. They just work when it comes to the sync. There are other aspects which made Sonos far superior to just using Apple's Airplay and iTunes, but those are not covered in the patents in question. My assumption is that if getting 3 devices to stay in sync - with what I assume is UDP streams and WiFi latency hiccups - was easy or even somewhat difficult, Apple would have been able to solve it. But they couldn't. There must be some special sauce here that Sonos developed and patented.