Currently on phone for 1 hour 46 minutes and counting trying to get a Sonos diagnostic looked at. If you need to call them right now, do it early or late.

Any time you call Sonos is a waste of time.

So glad we jumped ship when Yamaha started MusicCast, it has been pretty much rock solid. And the Yamaha WXA/WXC streaming gear don't feel like cheap pieces of Chinese plastic.

In 2019, I fully agree with you and was doing the same. But.... Something very drastic happened at Yamaha AV in 2020 when the pandemic hit.

Yamaha's AV division is a redheaded stepchild now with no one at the helm. And they are sinking. They have lost almost 1/2 their sku's in the home AV division since the pandemic. Quality has dropped thru the floor.
You realize they don't even make a soundbar with MusicCast in it anymore! NONE at all. And the only sound bars they currently offer are a joke of what they use to offer - it's all entry level crap now. And this can be seen in other product categories from the home AV division as well.
Anyone selling Yamaha home AV products right now, should be very worried about its future. You should be looking for other lines to carry as Yamaha's direction doesn't look like it's changing anytime soon.

Sadly, I agree with this. We have to contact them every time we place an order to see if they have any stock, because either the dealer site says "LIMITED AVAILABILITY" or "CONTACT US", or some models are just not on there at all. We have also had several Yamaha AVR failures over the last few years. Not what they used to be. Then we found out the hard way that the current gen AVRs do not allow 6.x configurations. We have several systems with a single surround back channel. This was never a problem because every AVR in the world let you select whether you had 1 or 2 surround back speakers. Not any more. Yamaha will not let you calibrate the system if it does not detect the other speaker. I have not tried "tricking" it, and see no point in doing so.

I am liking what Marantz is doing. Might try their stuff next. I never really had issues with it years ago when we did Marantz, Denon (before the D&M merger). Integra is always an option that seems solid if you can look past the rough years they had a while ago.

Not sure what Klipsch is doing with Pioneer and Onkyo. I do not consider them to be up to the same level of CI status. I will try and spec an Audiocontrol on the next job that warrants it.

How has MusicCast been with multiple units recently (last 1-2 years)? We were having problems with them disconnecting, even with the units on static IPs, WiFi or hard-wired and we didn't trust them enough to make the jump. We would consider it if I was comfortable knowing that they wouldn't fall off the network constantly. We haven't had these issues with Sonos or Heos.

I don’t know anything about Yamaha corporate focus with respect to A/V, but I think that the pandemic hurt the division. At approximately the beginning of the pandemic, there was a batch of defective HDMI chips, then chip production essentially stopped. There was some thought that a firmware update could deal with the chip issue, but it never did.  In at the time, I had the feeling that there was a large batch of partially completed units waiting for software or chips. I think that Yamaha was torn between waiting for the software, replacing the chip (when it became available) in all of the partially completed units or selling the units as is. Most users would never stumble over the problem audio formats, but I think that the perfectionist attitude didn’t want to release product with known issues. Meanwhile, there should have been some new models, but was hard to justify producing new models when there was an inventory of partially complete/defective units.

As a result I can imagine that division funding was reduced and/or talent slipped away.

My WXC-50 has lost the connection (only a few times in six years) and all I had to do is power cycle it.

EDIT- one of my customers has two WXC-50 and an AVR- the only reason he can't see any of them can be cured by turning WiFi off, then on- seems to be a roaming issue from his AirPort Expresses but he won't give them up. I swapped an AP in one room and asked for comments about any change in performance and nobody noticed, even though the AP's speed tests show that it's capable of more than 5x the speed. I gave up and took the AP back.

I’m expecting some brands to disappear and others to be sold and further consolidated in the next 3-5 years.

That new sonos APP is such a time suck. Right when they released it , I had a bunch of soundbars and TVs to set up. Nightmare. There is nothing about the layout of the app that I like. Now I get to play on the computer for an hour dealing with these stupid trailing credits and the fathers day sale. FFS
I am going out of my way to look for alternatives and hope not to get bitten in the ass.
Bluesound ? Anyone?

Been seeing the same thing all over. The RTI guys are saying the driver works better than the actual app now. I have been getting a lot of email, and the timing couldn't be better. I just released a brand new Sonos add-on for RTI that matches my templates.

Website: [Link: blackmancustoms.com]

Wow. That looks awesome!!

Gotta love the hubris of the ceo of Sonos.... arstechnica.com they even put the apology in app like they do to sell products direct to consumers.

What a clüsterfÜ¢k they created, phone calls from customers for simple tasks. I send customers a link to new tutorial and explain I cannot come by to help group zones or ungroup zones, and that usually users do that themselves.....

The volume lag is unacceptable.

Tech support is useless for custom integrators.