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It's not obvious at all, for wireless speakers, especially in complex multi-room setups. If it were obvious and easy, then everyone's wireless audio products wo

by Bud 5y ago

It's not obvious at all, for wireless speakers, especially in complex multi-room setups. If it were obvious and easy, then everyone's wireless audio products would handle this as well as Sonos does. But they don't. I bought two Sonos One SLs and had them set up as a stereo pair that my Apple TV could talk to almost instantly. Then recently I got a Sonos Beam soundbar and wanted to use my One SLs as surround speakers. I expected a long, painful setup similar to what I've experienced with competing products. Instead it was seamless, easy, and delightful, and I haven't had to touch or mess with the setup at all since. There are also a lot of details like how to handle time delays with a large set of wireless speakers so that sound is synced with a TV picture, comparative volume adjustments for a given acoustic, etc. Did you read the patents or any other reporting on the patents or this case? For instance: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/in-a-flashpoint-for-the-rebellion-against-big-tech-sonos-sues-google-for-patent-infringement/?itm_source=parsely-api https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/in-a-flashpoint-for-... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-loses-sonos-patent-case-starts-stripping-functionality-from-speakers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-loses-sonos-p...

mattmcknight 5y ago
While the implementation of synchronization is not obvious, the concept of doing it is. They shouldn't be able to patent the entire concept of allowing multiple speaker volumes to be adjusted with a single slider (which is what everyone is complaining about), as the implementation of that is trivial. Maybe that isn't what they've actually done though...maybe Google is keeping their synchronization stuff, but breaking the volume change since Sonos made the mistake of combining them in a single claim. That way Google can avoid violating that claim by not doing the volume part.
nailer 5y ago
Latency was literally the first thing I considered and I haven’t done any audio work since the nineties.

by Bud 5y ago

mattmcknight 5y ago

While the implementation of synchronization is not obvious, the concept of doing it is. They shouldn't be able to patent the entire concept of allowing multiple speaker volumes to be adjusted with a single slider (which is what everyone is complaining about), as the implementation of that is trivial. Maybe that isn't what they've actually done though...maybe Google is keeping their synchronization stuff, but breaking the volume change since Sonos made the mistake of combining them in a single claim. That way Google can avoid violating that claim by not doing the volume part.

nailer 5y ago

Latency was literally the first thing I considered and I haven’t done any audio work since the nineties.