Sonos on Wednesday announced that it has started to roll out support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 protocol on its wireless speakers.
As previously noted, AirPlay 2 is only fully supported on the company’s Sonos One and Play:5 speakers and its Beam and Playbase soundbars. Sonos users will need one of those speakers to directly activate AirPlay 2 control, but if they have one of those devices within a larger whole-home speaker setup, they’ll be able to control any other Sonos device they might have.
Apple rolled out AirPlay 2 as part of its iOS 11.4 update in late May, enabling its HomePod speaker to play the same audio across speakers in separate rooms, as well as the ability to play a pair of HomePods in stereo. (Sonos speakers already had the latter functionality.) Several third-party audio manufacturers have promised to include AirPlay 2 functionality in their speakers, including Bose, Bang & Olufsen, Marshall, Pioneer, and Bowers & Wilkins. With the update on Wednesday, Sonos is the first non-Apple speaker maker to support the protocol.
I have tested a beta version of the AirPlay 2 update on a Sonos One and Sonos Beam for the past week, and, generally speaking, it works as expected. You can start up any audio playing from an iOS device (or Mac), go to the usual AirPlay menu, and send it over to the appropriate Sonos speaker with little delay, and it pops up in the list of compatible devices automatically. You can use Siri from the source device to start music and control volume after adding the speakers in Apple’s Home app.
Sonos notes that you can use the Alexa assistant built into the One and Beam to control music started through Siri commands, too, although, to be clear, Siri is less involved here than it is on the HomePod where it is integrated from the ground up. There’s at least one quirk with the update, too: if you have AirPlay activated on non-Sonos speakers in the same area, you can’t control playback or volume on Sonos speakers from an iOS device’s lock screen. Instead, you have to use the Sonos app.
Nevertheless, the update is a major one for Sonos users. While Sonos has generally done well to integrate most major streaming services with its app, the company has made it difficult to play anything from sources that aren’t officially supported on its speakers. The company still doesn’t allow for Bluetooth streaming on its devices, and it hadn’t supported AirPlay at all before this latest update. For users of Apple Music, currently one of the two most popular music-streaming services in the US, it also allows for a modicum of voice controls, since Amazon’s Alexa assistant does not support voice controls for Apple Music on its own.
While a more complete integration with Siri is unlikely for any speaker that isn’t made by Apple, Sonos continues to promise that it will add support for the Google Assistant, though it has only said that it hopes to launch that support by the end of 2018. Sonos as a company filed for an IPO earlier this month, saying that it has sold 19 million products as of March 31 as part of its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
