Yeah it was odd most of my other Sonos devices were okay including some Play:3's which I thought would surely be deprecated. I made all the purchases roughly around the same time after our renovation.
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Some perspective is called for. Sonos aren't just "speakers". They are an intelligent piece of electronics.
The speakers I am listening to at the moment are Radio Shack Optimus-1 that I bought during the Nixon administration. Still sound good. Never had a firmware update.
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My old Cerwin-Vega's still rock in my basement.. heee... 
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Nice! Until I lost it to Katrina, I had a Grundig Quadraphonic system that mostly worked. Even had a couple spare Shure needles for it.
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Agreed, and "Me too". My heartburn with the legacy situation was/is mitigated by the fact that the only thing I have that fell in that category is a Connect, which I never use anyway...so really, it's just a 30% discount waiting to happen on something else, which I haven't bought anyway! LOL
S.
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Amen!
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I had a set of JBL L100-T's that eventually gave up the ghost as the foam around the woofer disintegrated. And they'd been in the garage for a long time, as they were the size of Mini-Fridges as the ex-MRS wasn't keen on them...lol
Wish I still had them, they were AMAZING.
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I’m not an audiophile, in fact having a background in Electronics makes me highly sceptical of audiophile claims and general snake oil. I call the hard core “audiophiles”, audio fools. I mean directional cables, wooden stands to keep cables off the floor, 10cm thick shielding ... it's 99% woo woo BS.
That said, I do appreciate good quality sound and you dont have to spend a lot of money to get it. Personally Im a HT guy and I spent about $15k on my 5.1 speakers (Krix), amplifier (Denon) and universal BD player (Oppo). When the movies you watch have Dolby True-HD or DTS-Master High resolution, highbit-rate audio you absolutely can tell the difference between a $2k setup and a $15k setup (after that the laws of diminishing returns kick in hard).
I do like music too, I have a small SACD collection and I can tell you Pink Floyd's DSOM remastered from its quad channel recording in 1Bit @ 2.8Mhz DSD is a religious experience that leaves even turntable aficionados in awe.
Btw, you can build a really nice system on the cheap by buying high quality 2nd hand speakers - I did this for my Games room. I got a basic new Yamaha AVR and over a few months bought a nice set of Krix speakers for about $800 all up. I I were to buy them new I'd have been up for $3k.
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100% agreed.
S
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Yep I remember the 2008 death match between "coat hanger" speaker wire and super expensive "premium" monster cables.. seems it's hard to tell the difference.
This is a very old link...
I'm sure technology has "improved" since then... 
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Funny --- for what it's worth, back in the late 80's I did "hear" the difference between "cheap" speaker wire and Monster cable. I was running a set of 200W continuous rated JBL L100T speakers (as mentioned above) with a Pioneer 50 (or so) Watt integrated amplifier, and although they sounded better than what had been on the amp previously, I didn't realize how good they could sound until I connected the Monster Wire.
Wow. What a difference. Must be the wire right? Ah...well, sort of.
Turns out the Pioneer was running right at the hairy edge of its ability to drive the speakers. Dropping the "much" larger gauge Monster in there dropped the loss across the wire enough the amp was able to drive the JBL's better. Of course moving up to ANY wire of larger gauge would probably have worked...lol
Later, connecting the Yamaha M65 Amplifier with 170 Watts of continuous power sounded noticably different as it was able to drive the speakers properly, but it certainly wasn't because the Monster was dramatically better in general, just dramatically better than Piano Wire. LOL
S.
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I think I spent about $30 on a 25m reel of 12 AWG OFC stranded cable for my systems and it sounds amazing - the correct gauge cable and Oxygen Free Copper is all you need to get excellent sound quality. The OFC is just so the cable doesnt corrode internally and TBH it's prolly quite hard to find non-OFC stranded cable these days.
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I heard of tests where people used 12 Gauge Romex on their speakers, and the difference couldn't be heard between "High End" speaker wire and Romex. I always thought that was quite interesting, and sort of underscores your point...solid copper all the way. LOL
S.
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Solid copper is totally fine, it's just not very flexible and easier to break compared to stranded.
You only need to look at Network cabling, stranded is typically used for patch cables and solid core for building wiring. Both carry the same bandwidth signal but solid core is easier to terminate and isnt expected to move once installed.
Yeah, clearly not practical in most cases, and certainly ugly, and definitely not very flexible...lol
S.
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Yeah unfortunately when you bought your Play 5's they had already been on the market since 2009. To my recollection they have only raised the price on the Play 5's by $50.
At the time promising us a discount for replacements while bricking our legacy devices THEN raising prices before we could reorder was really bad "optics" for corporate and especially the CEO.
If you had no intention of reordering it was also bad - you were looking at unsupported devices that could stop working or degrade performance-wise at any point over the next few years. You could not update your app or firmware. Also if you had any "modern" devices in the mix you were stuck - if you upgraded your app you could not use your old devices if you did not then your "new" devices would never get updates.
To their credit but only after the backlash splitting things into 2 separate systems and allowing those replacing their older units to keep them and still get the discount is a "better" way to handle this. You are still kind screwed if you have a mix of old/new devices though as you will not be able to "share" between systems.
Sonos demonstrated that their commitment to their existing products is lacking and only the next new thing matters. Silicon Valley ethos at it's finest!
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I bought a Sonos Connect, as I already had good speakers and amps, and I even had the pre-existing ability to have two different sources playing in two different rooms (with a JVC RX1028, a tuner/amp from the 1980s).
But Sonos was always very coy about what the actual bitrate was, and their "partners" sometime provided a lower-quality stream to Sonos, while offering higher-quality streams available to those those who knew the correct URL, or users of the very fine "AirAudio" app, which allows any stream to be forwarded over to a Sonos at full bitrate.
The preference for "streaming" may have killed the idea of having one's own "record collection", be it vinyl or digital, but what I've seen from free trials of SiriusXM, TuneIn, Tidal, and their ilk is a lot of repetition. Pandora at least throws the occasional curve ball, but overall, the "streams" are little better than "Casey Kasem's America's Top 100 Countdown" for whatever genre you select.
So, regardless of the planned obsolescence, is the SOUND any good? Maybe to you, but if you had my old circa 1974 McIntosh 240 tube amp or my 1980s JVC amp, and sets of of Walsh Ohm2s and Polk Rt25i speakers, you'd quickly realize that one's own music, even mp3s, sound much better than most of what is being streamed at bitrates that Sonos makes it difficult to determine.
Maybe earbuds have gotten everyone used to tinny sound, but I think that sound quality matters. I think that PROGRAM SOUND QUALITY is the problem with Sonos, not their frozen features for my Sonos Connect.
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As a long time Sonos owner, that feels like a hot take to me.
They have had amazing backwards compatibility for a very very long time.
The fact that now they are looking to progress their firmware and hardware in an era of stronger and strong competition in their space (Amazon and Google) makes sense, and while they did make a few gaffs as you mention, by and large they have stuck to the HISTORY of commitment to the products.
I'll take their history over small missteps on the way.
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