At this point, my very agitated husband’s excitement started to die down considerably. He “decided to let me deal with it.” That’s fair, since this is my job, but that’s not the attitude you’d expect from someone who was celebrating all those boxes as a miracle just a few weeks earlier.
Side note: To factory reset a Sonos speaker, you need to unplug the power cord, then press and hold the Bluetooth button while plugging the power cord back in, then press and hold the Bluetooth button until the light on the front flashes orange and white. I had to do this multiple times for each speaker, and I also did this while on the phone with Sonos tech support.
“I have a complaint,” I said. At this point, I was balancing the Sonos subwoofer on the corner of my lap, holding the Bluetooth button on the front of the subwoofer with my left hand and feeling for the plug on the bottom with my right hand. “I don’t think the factory reset method needs to be that difficult.”
“Ideally, the customer wouldn’t have to do this so often,” he said mildly.
The last straw was when, after weeks of trying, everything worked. I just had one more thing to test: If you add the Sonos Ace headphones to your app, you can enable TV Audio Swap. This means you can hear the TV sound through your Sonos Ace headphones without disturbing other people in the room.
I turned the Ace on (factory reset of course, as my app couldn’t find the headphones on the first two attempts). Then I clicked on Settings in the app and then on the Ace headphones. I couldn’t find the option to toggle the audio. When I double-checked the instructions, I discovered, much to my dismay, that TV Audio Swap only works with the Sonos app for iOS.
After weeks of trying, I still couldn’t bear the prospect of resetting everything to factory settings again to play the same circus on my iPhone. Sorry to anyone who wants to hear about audio swap: I sat down to write this instead.
Give me something
Sonos speakers work really well. When I finally got the whole package 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 TV speakers or setting up a small Bluetooth speaker on the sink while you do the dishes, the room-filling sound of a complete home theater system is overwhelming.
Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my all-time favorite movies. I’ve seen it three times in the theater, and testing a home theater sound system is a great excuse to watch it again and again. I wouldn’t have believed how much of the experience the Sonos system could recreate with Dolby Atmos.
Photo: Adrienne So
