The Sonos ‘Ultimate’ Home Theater System Needs a Lot of Elbow Grease

It was at this point that my very excited husband became much less excited. He “decided to let me deal with it.” That’s fair, as this is my job, but this is not the attitude you’d expect from someone who had hailed all these boxes as a miracle a few weeks before.

On a side note: To factory-reset a Sonos speaker, you must unplug the power cord, then press and hold the Bluetooth button while plugging the power cord back in, and then hold the Bluetooth button until the light on the front flashes orange and white. I had to do this for every speaker several times and also did this while on the phone with Sonos tech support.

“I have a complaint,” I said. At the time, I was balancing the Sonos sub in my lap on one corner, holding the Bluetooth button on the front side of the sub with my left hand, while fumbling for the plug at the bottom with my right hand. “I don’t think the factory reset method has to be this hard.”

“Ideally, the customer would not have to do this that often,” he said mildly.

The final straw came when, after weeks of fiddling, everything was up and running. I just had one more thing to test, which is that when you add the Sonos Ace headphones to your app, you can turn on TV Audio Swap—that is, you can listen to TV audio on your Sonos Ace headphones without bothering someone else who is in the room.

I turned on the Ace (factory-resetting it, of course, because my app couldn’t find the headphones for the first two tries). Then I clicked on Settings in the app, and the Ace headphones. I could not find the option to swap the audio. When I double-checked the instructions, I realized—to my dawning horror—that TV Audio Swap only works with the Sonos for iOS app.

After weeks of fiddling, I could not bear the prospect of factory-resetting everything yet again to play out the same rigmarole on my iPhone. Sorry to folks who want to hear about audio swap: I sat down to write this instead.

Gimme Some

Sonos speakers really do work well. When I finally got the whole bundle set up and started playing Sabrina Carpenter in the living room, my 7-year-old son immediately ran in and started dancing. If you’re used to listening to tinny television speakers or propping a little Bluetooth speaker on the sink while washing dishes, the room-filling sound of a full home theater system is mind-blowing.

Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my all-time favorite movies. I saw it three times in the theaters, and testing a home theater sound system is a convenient excuse to watch it over and over again. I would not have believed how much of the experience the Sonos system was able to replicate with Dolby Atmos.