Sonos

Once upon a time, in the analogue world of the late 20th Century we all had massive HiFi systems.
They dominated our Sitting rooms, required tweaking and feeding with radio, cassettes and records. Later, CD players arrived and ousted the record players.
But the world turned, digital downloads arrived and suddenly our computers and iPods were our music sources. That was not an ideal solution for general listening, so gadgets like the Roku player and Monitor Audio's iPod dock appeared and then finally the integrated solution: Sonos.
Sonos is probably the best all-round streaming solution as it can access your .mp3 music library from your PC or, as in our case, from our NAS box, plus music from multiple on-line sources such as Spotify, the BBC and Tidal, plus Sonos radio that gives you access to virtually any radio station around the globe.
Sonos do a bridge unit you simply plug in to your amp and speakers, then you disassemble your HiFi system: the record player, the cassette player, the tuner and the CD player all go.
And finally when we downsized, the amp and speakers went - in our new house we have ceiling speakers and Sonos amplifiers in the loft. Now it's all driven off the app on our phones.

Sonos is a long way from being perfect: it's eye-wateringly expensive, simply does not work properly with either its own, badly flawed 2.4GHz WiFi distribution system or co-exist properly with other 2.4GHz WIFi (the secret to a reliable system is to wire all your speakers and amplifiers then manually disable the Sonos WiFi, there is no other solution). But it is brilliant, easy to use and quite unique.
It was so successful that it became a victim of its own ambitions: in 2022 the company acted with breathtaking arrogance (matched only by Apple who saw fit to remove apps people had already paid for from their phones beacuse they didn't fit Apple's policies) by effectively making all their first generation devices, many only a couple of years old, unusable by altering the basis upon which their app worked.
So you had to have one app for the older kit and one app for the newer kit, and couldn't group the two.
They were so far up their own arses that not only could they not see how much that decision annoyed their customers they followed up in 2024 by unilaterally forcing everyone to upgrade their app to a new version that simply didn't work properly.
The resulting outcry from huge number of well-heeled customers should have forced them to backtrack and reinstate the previous version while they regrouped but they persisted, finally even the MD had to write to their entire user base to apologise (but completely failed to address everyones' concerns). The app continues to be slow, unresponsive and iffy, even following numerous updates and tweaks. And God Forbid you should lose Internet connectivity, then the whole thing stops working. The underlying issue is that every change you make, including simple, local things like altering volume has to go up to Sonos's servers in the cloud, be processed and come back down again. What eejut dreamed that up? It's a classic recipe for delay and unresponsiveness.
Verdict: Technically a sound product sadly let down by Corporate arrogance and stupidity.