Review on Sonos Bridge for Sonos Wireless Network - Discontinued by Manufacturer | Find Availability and Alternatives by Eduardo Long

I used to be a Sonos fan. Everything went so smoothly. the sound is excellent. the function is almost perfect. Adding ingredients was a blast. hell. until they decided to rush out with a new version of the controller so they didn't have to use de Sonosnet and allow their own Wi-Fi network to stream music. This has happened in the last few weeks (August-September 2014). Then everything turned into a big nightmare. components are lost from the network; The still "seen" components cannot access the web music services, new components are not registered in the system. I can continue with the problems with this 5.1 software "update" from Sonos. I've invested quite a bit of $ into this system (three Play 1s, a Play 5, two Connects and a Bridge) and I can't use it at all. Support is clearly going through the same nightmare, so they're completely helpless. This Sonos initiative is very similar to the typical marketing rush to rush into the market with a new feature that hasn't been properly tested in all conditions. Most likely, it has not even been tested under the most common conditions. UPDATE: According to Sonos customer service. After a few failed attempts at Phone CService I received a CSR which stayed with me for about 1 hour or 90 minutes. He was probably the most patient CSR I've ever encountered. The supervisor was handy to assist him with this. I also brought in my own router specialist. What happened was that some Sonos items didn't recognize my router's wrong MAC address. All of my 20 or so ethernet devices including two Play 1s got this 11:11:11:11:11 MAC address. But Bridge and Connect - no. That's why it didn't work. Sonos CSR concluded that the issue was MAC address related and my router specialist suggested it might be related to the MAC address masked to the router. He changed it back to the original MAC, and voila, everything was as smooth as ever. I understand this is a complex device, but there are some design inconsistencies that caused some Sonos devices to work and others not. I think the new software didn't help. BUT I'll admit that after going through various tech support processes, Sonos is overall very good considering they sell $300 items instead of $3000. I had serious problems with significantly more expensive audio devices such as Denon receivers or Sony TVs. So I've upped the original one star rating to 4 stars.