Victrola Moves On From Sonos With New Connect Capabilty, As Sonos Still Struggles To Fix App

After initially punting on Sono’s turntable Company Victrola has finally seen the light with the Company now allowing their latest offering to be wirelessly streamed to other devices, the move comes as Sonos admits that they are still struggling to fix their app.

Victrola’s decision to move on to other devices was taken as Sono’s sales tank worldwide, with the still laying off staff while discounting products out to shift stock.

12 months ago, Victrola released their Stream Sapphire, initially it was designed to stream audio to Sono’s speakers.

The launch of a new update changes all that with their Stream Carbon, Onyx, and Pearl turntables able to stream wirelessly via Bluetooth, Roon, and UPnP.

The official announcement lists:

Stream vinyl wirelessly to UPnP-enabled audio devices, including speakers, A/V receivers, HiFi streamers, smart TVs, and other Wi-Fi products from brands like KEF, JBL, Sony, Samsung, WiiM, Denon, Marantz, and a multitude of other audio devices.

Why the Company only got into bed with Sonos has not been explained.

A recent Company statement said “Victrola is breaking free of Sonos exclusivity in its streaming vinyl turntables with the new Stream Sapphire. While the flagship Stream Carbon and more recent Stream Onyx can only natively stream audio to a Sonos speaker or sound system, the Stream Sapphire can output audio to any speaker or system that supports the Roon platform, opening up your vinyl collection to a wider array of wireless options.

Additional specs for the Victrola Stream Sapphire include a brushless motor with support for 33.3 or 45 rpm, a single-knob design for volume and playback, and a carbon-fibre tonearm that comes stock with an Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge. The Stream Sapphire also supports UPnP for networking with streaming speakers or smart TVs.

Sonos’s so called chief innovation officer Nick Millington admitted in an update over the weekend that he and his team are “100% focused” on understanding and addressing issues with the Sonos app”.

Really, the app only went pear shaped six months ago and they are still trying to “understand” what went wrong with an app that should never have been released.

Millington claims that the Sonos team that are left after a Companywide slashing of staff that “The team and I remain 100% focused on two important priorities”.

1. understanding the root cause of every single customer issue, whether big or small, whether common or rare, and making sure the technical performance of the app meets or exceeds what you have come to expect from Sonos.

2. closing gaps in the functionality and usability of the new app relative to what you enjoyed before, in a priority order that is as responsive as possible to the feedback we receive from you.

As for the tens of thousands of howling complaints Millington claims that users who have shared diagnostic information have “sharpened” the team’s focus, leading to several improvements.

What has not explained is why the bulk of the problems that Millington is now addressing were not identified during their beta testing stage.

That is if one was actually took place in a live environment.

Back in October he was promising that several features were on their way, such as alarm snoozing, better queue management, and playlist editing.

Apparently, the work has been “slow-going “and Sonos still hasn’t added playlist editing back, nor the ability for a user to queue an entire folder from their local music library.

According to Millington, both are on their way in “upcoming releases.”