You Can Finally Get Sonos’s Big Hi-Fi Upgrade. Here’s What You Need to Know

The Sonos S2 update, which was announced in March, is live right now. It’s an entirely new app and operating system (OS) that, according to Sonos, is designed to “power the next generation of products and experiences.” It enables Sonos’s products, both old and new, to play higher-quality audio and gives some of Sonos’s newest products, like the brand-new Arc soundbar, support more advanced technologies.

Sonos

Gifts Under $200

The One SL

Scatter them around the house.

• $199.00 at Sonos
  $219.00 (9% off)

Sonos

The Roam

A portable speaker that’s great on the go, but expands your system at home.

• $179.00 at Sonos

Sonos

The Five

A living room centerpiece, complete with line-in for your turntable.

• $549.00 at Sonos

Sonos

Sonos Arc

The Arc was Sonos’s premium Dolby Atmos soundbar before the Arc Ultra was released. It has a grand total of 11 high-performance drivers, two of which are upward-firing to enable those vertical high channels for Dolby Atmos. It also has smart speaker functionality (just like the Beam 2), so you can control it with your voice using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. It supports AirPlay 2 as well.

• $699 at Sonos
  $899.00 (22% off)

How to update: If you have a Sonos system at home, you can update to the new app today. All you need to do is download the new S2 app (available on iOS and Android) and delete the old one. Your Sonos system will then automatically update to S2.

Here’s what else you need to know about Sonos’s S2 update.

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Folks with older Sonos speakers are the most affected

Not every Sonos product supports the new Sonos S2 app and operating system. If you’ve been a Sonos user for ten years or more and you still use some of those original speakers or components, there’s a good chance that they won’t support Sonos S2. These speakers will not support S2:

• Zone Players, Learn More
• CR200, Learn More
• Bridge, Learn More
• Connect (Gen 1), Learn More
• Connect:Amp (Gen 1), Learn More
• Play:5 (Gen 1), Learn More

To update your newer Sonos speakers and components, you’ll have to cut the old ones out of the group.

Most Sonos speakers and components will support the S2 update. The Sonos app will tell you via push notification or within the app. This will be a fairly simple thing for most Sonos users, but it gets a bit complicated if you have an older Sonos product that doesn’t support S2 integrated into your system.

If you have a Sonos speaker or component that doesn’t support the S2 update, then the rest of the Sonos products its grouped with won’t be able to get the update either. You’ll have to degroup the component or speaker that doesn’t support the S2 update in order to upgrade the rest of the system. For instance, if you have two Play:5 (Gen 2) speakers and one Play:5 (Gen 1) speaker, you’ll have to de-group the older speaker to update your two newer Play:5 speakers.

Sonos

You don’t have to get the new app

Your current Sonos app will prompt you to download the new Sonos S2 app when it becomes available, but you won’t be required to download it. In case you don’t download it, you should know that your current Sonos app will be renamed “Sonos S1 Controller.” This name change could be a little confusing if you didn’t know the update if coming.

There are two main reasons why you should want to download the new app, however. First, the Sonos speakers and components will have to be updated with the new software and use the new app in order to support future, higher-resolution audio technologies. And two, all Sonos speakers that are released after May 2020 will come with the S2 update preinstalled and will not be able to be controlled with the Sonos S1 Controller app.

In a nutshell: if you want to add new speakers to your current Sonos system, you’ll have to have them updated.

Sonos will continue to support its older products, in a limited capacity

If you’re worried about your old Sonos speakers getting totally left in the dust — fear not. Sonos will continue to support its older speakers and components; you’ll be able to control them will the S1 Controller app; the S1 Controller app will still receive software updates of its own to fix bugs and security issues.

Sonos is, of course, heavily encouraging people with older products to upgrade them to new ones. It’s offering a trade-in program, called Trade Up, where you can save 30% on new products by trading your older non-compatible products in.

Chase Pellerin

The update gets you HD streaming (and Dolby Atmos for Arc)

As Sonos explained in its press release, the main reason for the S2 update is so that its current and future speakers and components can play better audio. To date, Sonos has been able to support lossless audio that’s about CD quality. It’s good, but more and more streaming services are actually able to super even higher resolution audio — services like Tidal and Amazon Music HD — and Sonos wants their system to support those, too.

The other big thing is support for Dolby Atmos. Sonos just announced its first soundbar that works with Dolby Atmos, named Arc. (No other Sonos soundbar other than Arc will support Dolby Atmos, even after the S2 update.) Sonos has been making a big splash in the home theater realm for several years, with three soundbars and several bundle deals, and increasing the bandwidth so that it can support more immersive sound technologies makes sense. Plus, it gives movie buffs even more reason to buy Sonos.

And big improvements to speaker grouping

The S2 update is a big improvement for people who have several different groups of Sonos speakers placed around their homes. It comes with a new feature called ‘Room Groups,’ which will effectively allow users to create more longer-lasting groups of speakers, and then control them all more easily, within their home.

For instance, if you have two Sonos speakers in your kitchen and three Sonos speakers in your living room, and another two in your bedroom, the S2 app allows you to control them without you having to constantly “regroup” them individually.

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