‘We’re by far the most successful player in home theater’: why Sonos CEO Tom Conrad isn’t worried about LG and TCL muscling in on his turf with Dolby Atmos FlexConnect
Ahead of Sonos’ recent launch of its new Sonos Play and Era 100 SL speakers, I had the opportunity to speak to CEO Tom Conrad about what the company has been up to since its last big launch, the Sonos Arc Ultra in 2024.
We talked about the new speakers, and then we spent a lot of time talking about what went wrong with the company’s big apps disaster that same year, what’s still wrong, and how the company has changed to fix it – and Conrad was very candid in this discussion, so I highly recommend reading it if you’re interested in Sonos.
But one of the other big things that happened during the period that Sonos has been working on is the launch of Dolby Atmos FlexConnect. This is a technology that allows you to get a great home theater experience without the need for speakers placed in the traditional front left, front right, rear left and rear right positions: you place the speakers where you want them, even if they are unbalanced or the speakers do not match, and the system automatically determines how to provide the best surround sound.
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One of the great features of these systems is that you can connect wireless speakers directly to a TV, without an HDMI cable: wireless audio, simply set up using an app, and you don’t lose an HDMI port.
I asked Conrad if Sonos is worried about this major trend that effectively excludes Sonos products from the future of wireless home theater, and he certainly gives the air of a man who isn’t concerned.
“As you know, we are by far the most successful player in the home theater space and are constantly taking more and more market share from the companies you are talking about,” Conrad says.
“This is a significant part of our business, and we are pioneering wireless audio distribution in the family room, and we will have our own view on how this evolves over the coming quarters.”
I asked Conrad what he thought of FlexConnect technology. “So FlexConnect is interesting,” he begins. “There are really three things that need to happen in a FlexConnect style implementation. You need to get the elements from the media to the speaker, whether it’s through the TV, through the set-top box or through the soundbar, something has to circulate the elements through the air.
“And then you have to position the speakers in the room, understand where they are and what their orientation is.
“And then the last piece is, understanding the position of the speakers and the bits of the device, you have to render the bits appropriately for that position and that orientation.
“Dolby has done a great job of telling the FlexConnect story by encompassing all three dimensions, but the technology in FlexConnect is really just the last part. It takes into account positional information [of the speakers] and the pieces [from the media] once they are on the speaker, and play it back.
“And the other two dimensions – the positioning and transmission of bits from the source to the speakers – are sort of left as an exercise for the student, which is why the LG solution is owned by LG and the TCL solution is owned by TCL.
And you can imagine that, even if Dolby wants to talk about the universality of FlexConnect the same way it talks about Atmos, the LGs and TCLs of the world might not be very motivated to create a system for mixing and matching speakers. [from other brands] with their televisions. »
So, is this something Sonos would support in the future? (Standard Dolby Atmos has been available on Sonos products for years, and support is included in the current Sonos Beam 2nd Gen, Sonos Arc Ultra, and Sonos Era 300.)
“I guess I could just say we’re interested in this whole space, the whole area of: how do you get the bits from the source to the speakers? How do you position the speakers in three-dimensional space? And how do you render? We’ll continue to work on our roadmap.”
While the Dolby Atmos FlexConnect preview is interesting, Conrad is obviously very vague about future plans – but we can read between the lines here.
From the three questions Conrad asks at the end, we already know a little more about Sonos technology in this area.
“How to position speakers in three-dimensional space?” Sonos’ TruePlay technology was never designed to map the positions of your speakers, but rather compensates for your position in the room and the reflections from your walls relative to the speakers.
But reading that statement, you’re probably thinking “Wait, that looks a lot like speaker position mapping” – and we’ll get to that shortly.
But more directly, TCL and LG’s Dolby Atmos FlexConnect systems both use audio alone to detect speaker positions, streaming sounds and listening to them with the devices’ microphones, with remarkable accuracy in 2D. This is how Sonos TruePlay Quick Tuning works. So while the current TruePlay algorithm isn’t quite right, the knowledge appears to exist within the company.
As for rendering 3D sound, Conrad himself said that the FlexConnect system takes care of that – although, again, Sonos has its own knowledge in this area. Psychoacoustic tricks like using reflections and manipulating time of flight are common in Dolby Atmos virtual devices, and the Sonos Beam is one of them. TruePlay again involves adjusting the reflections for the width and height channels.
But more than that, Sonos introduced the idea of a new type of 3D sound processing for the Sonos Ace headphones and the TV Swap feature, following your head in its own recreation of an Atmos-like 3D soundscape.
The Sonos Ace’s 3D soundscape can even be designed to mimic the sound profile you get from your main Sonos speaker system, depending on the placement of the speakers relative to your usual sitting position. It uses TruePlay data to do this – and we now know that Sonos has a product capable of creating a unique 3D sound environment based on the position of your speakers relative to your seating position.
So it seems obvious that Sonos finds the same type of technology as FlexConnect interesting, even if it hasn’t yet added speaker positioning freedom to its home theater setups.
But none of this answers the first question: “How do you get the bits from the source to the speakers?” »
This is where Sonos is really in danger, in my opinion. HDMI is an open standard that allows any type of soundbar to work with any type of TV. A similar attempt at developing a wireless standard, WiSA, never got off the ground.
This leaves TV companies free to use this part as a locking method. Samsung, TCL, Sony, and LG all offer some sort of wireless speaker option that works directly with your TV, enabled by the TV’s software itself.
Sonos has no power over TV software, leaving it with two options: partner with smart TV software makers to integrate support, or offer some sort of HDMI dongle connection.
The latter is relatively simple, but still uses an HDMI port, and part of the appeal of these wireless systems is not having to deal with a port for your audio at all.
When it comes to collaborating with smart TV manufacturers, it’s difficult. LG and Samsung create their own software. Google TV is huge, but Sonos and Google don’t have a good relationship.
It’s a plot of TVs sold only cover this group, especially the high-end options. But there are still some interesting options. Amazon Fire TV and Roku could be open to a partnership, and support for Fire TV could also mean support for Fire TV Sticks, which can of course be connected to other TVs.
And then there’s the Apple TV 4K, which is rare among streaming boxes because it can capture audio from anything connected to the TV, as well as generate its own audio from streaming apps. Apple and Sonos have long enjoyed a warm relationship, with the Sonos Amp being the only streaming amp that natively supports Apple Music even today.
The Apple TV 4K is popular with home theater enthusiasts, so perhaps Sonos could come to an agreement with Apple to provide flexible support for a 3D wireless sound option at the operating system level.
Whatever Sonos plans, I hope it can roll them out soon: the wireless soundbar revolution is coming at a rapid pace, and Sonos doesn’t want to be left behind.
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