Wirecutter Pulls Its Recommendation of Sonos

The new Sonos app is so terrible that the influential Wirecutter reviews site has pulled its recommendations for the products.

“After careful consideration, we no longer recommend the Sonos multiroom audio platform as the best overall choice,” Wirecutter’s Dennis Burger writes in a new addendum to the site’s The Best Multiroom Wireless Speaker System review. “Sonos recently rolled out a major update to its control app that had a ton of problems, leaving its customers with a much less intuitive experience than they had before. While the company is slowly addressing some of the major issues with the new app, this is not the first time Sonos has hurt customer trust through poorly executed changes.”

I am a fan of, and subscriber to, Wirecutter, and I consider this site to be the modern version of Consumer Reports and a trusted source of reviews and opinions about personal technology products. When I noticed that Wirecutter had reversed its Sonos recommendations, I was immediately reminded of the 1990s-era controversy in which Consumer Reports described how the Suzuki Samurai small SUV rolled over during testing. But as Laurent reminded me, there is perhaps a more recent and relevant example: In 2017, Consumer Reports pulled its recommendation for Microsoft Surface products, citing its industry-worst failure rates.

That episode, like the Samurai controversy, ended up working out for the most part, in Microsoft’s case when the publication began recommending most Surface products again a year later. So it’s possible that Sonos could once again find itself in Wirecutter’s good graces too, I guess. It does note that “Sonos still makes great speakers,” and that using them with AirPlay (if you’re an Apple user), Spotify Connect, or, with a few compatible units, Bluetooth, “works well.” The problem, it correctly explains, is the new app. Because it’s so bad, Wirecutter can “no longer hold up the company’s own ecosystem as the best way to interact with the system.”

There, I must disagree: The Sonos app was never the best way to interact with Sonos speakers, and I’ve been complaining about that fact for years. But with this horrible and broken new app, Sonos has gone below the bottom of the barrel and tunneled into the ground below that barrel for a considerable distance. Just when you thought we’d seen the worst, Sonos proved us all wrong again.

Because the new Sonos app is so terrible, and because Sonos is taking so long to fix the problems that customers first voiced in early May at the initial release, Wirecutter says it is “completely re-envisioning” its guide for multiroom wireless speaker systems. It will no longer recommend the Sonos multiroom audio platform as the best overall choice, and the guide will “reflect how people set up and use multiroom audio systems today.”

I’m curious what they come up with, but I’ll be writing about some related changes I’m making in this space soon as well.