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Sonos is fixing its most frustrating issue

Sonos is fixing its most frustrating issue

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The "wireless" audio system will actually be wireless soon.

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Sonos is planning to eliminate the most annoying part of its popular "wireless" music setup. Currently, if you've got Sonos speakers throughout the house, at least one of them needs to be plugged into your home router to achieve wireless playback and keep everything in sync. Plugging in the company's Bridge (seen below) is another option, but that means you're spending $50 on top of speaker costs to stream your music in every room. Thankfully, Sonos has figured out how to remove the bothersome requirement altogether.

"We’ve found a way to deliver all the benefits of SonosNet without a product directly connected to your router," the company said in a blog post. And it's all accomplished with a software update, so you won't need to upgrade your hardware or buy anything extra.

Bridgerouter_medium
The Sonos Bridge won't be necessary after the update.

The new approach involves setting up one of Sonos' speakers with a smartphone and entering your Wi-Fi password to link everything together. Despite the lack of a physical network connection, Sonos says its products will "continue to communicate directly with one another, keeping your music in perfect sync." There will be some exceptions; if you've got an enormous house or rooms with poor Wi-Fi signal, the old method may still work better. But for almost everyone else, Sonos thinks the new approach will work just fine. But just to make sure, the company is planning to test the new setup extensively before rolling it out to everyone. A beta program will be detailed in the coming weeks, and you can sign up in hopes of taking part at Sonos' website right now.