The Vergecast - PSVR 2 review, and the best multiroom audio gadgets

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of not-yet-announced Sonos speakers: Adi Robertson and Sean Hollister discuss their review of the PSVR2, and how it ranks among the other VR options today, along with its predecessor.  PSVR 2 review: love on a leash We plugged the PSVR2 into a PC, and here’s what it does Meta is improving Quest hand tracking so you can touch buttons and type on virtual keyboards Alex Cranz, Chris Welch, Chris Person, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy discuss the world of multi-room audio devices to play music. How do smart speakers like Sonos, Amazon Echo, and Google Home compare to audiophile gadgets like the WiiM Mini and the Raspberry Pi? WiiM’s Mini and Pro are the Chromecast Audio’s real replacement Exclusive: these are the new Sonos Era speakers  Amazon’s Alexa app gets more Sonos-y with new multiroom audio controls How to set up multiroom music playback with Google Home speakers Email us at [e-mail], or call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of not yet announced Sonos speakers. That's right. We've got a bunch of stuff on the side about it. You should go read it. I'm your friend Alex Cranz. And I just realized I haven't used my Oculus Quest 2 in like four months. I'm probably going to blame the Steam Deck for that lack of playing time because Baldur Escape 3 is really, really good. But I also think it's because I'm getting tired of that form of VR and all the metaverse junk. And I want something different. Which is why I have selfishly brought Addie and Sean onto the show to talk about the PSVR too, because it feels more like what I want, which is, you know, to play games in VR. Also, to carry on that theme of things I want, the other thing we're going to be talking about on the show today is the state of multi-room audio.

It's not just Sonos anymore. And I've got two Chris's and a gin-toey coming on to explain things. So stay tuned. More's coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical. operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone

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seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes,

game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Okay. Welcome back. Sony's new VR headset. It's out. The PSVR 2 is available right now, almost anywhere I think you can buy Sony game stuff. And my good friends and yours, Adi Robertson and Sean Hollister have been playing with this thing for a while. So we sat down to talk with them about what's working, what's not working, and why it's not backwards compatible with the games from the original PSVR. Let's go straight to the conversation because it is a lot of fun. Okay, Addy, Sean, what's it like being back in the real world? Very high fidelity.

Better field of view. And you guys were using the Sony PlayStation VR2. That's the name, right? Yeah, we've had it for over a week now. We had myself, Addy, and Tom Warren, all got to spend lots of time in this thing, shooting bows and flailing around with our octopus tentacles. It was great. You guys had both used the original PSVR, too.

And I know that both of you use a lot of VR. Addie, I think you've been photographed with almost every. VR headset the Vurch has ever used? Yeah, I think that's right. So you guys did this awesome, awesome video. You did this great review about the product. And I was kind of surprised because I found myself, even though I have a Quest 2, and I love my Quest 2, and I occasionally use my Quest 2 for things like Supernatural and games and stuff,

I kind of wanted this one. Can you explain to me why I suddenly want this, even though you made it very clear. It is very expensive. It only does games. And there were a lot of drawbacks. I think it's kind of this perfect middle point between something like an Oculus Quest and spending ridiculous amounts of money on a Windows computer to get your thing running. Now, if you've already got a ridiculous Windows gaming computer, sure. Maybe you want to take a look at the Valve Index.

But even then, Addie, I think you were telling me that you think that this is a better piece of kit in many ways than like the highest end PC headsets we've seen, right? For one thing, the highest end PC headsets are like four years old now. Like, the Valth Index came out in 2019. So just super high-res, like fancy panels were not as ubiquitous. Eye tracking was not as common. At this point, I don't know. It's partly the headset, but it's also, it's just that it's easy. Like, I've done so much PCVR and so much Steam VR, like, fiddling around with settings

and trying to make sure that I have the right cables for the right things. And it is just kind of a joy to be able to grab a single cable and plug it into a thing and enter a code or buy a game and be like, Like, I understand that this is going to work. I was blown away, blown away by the ease of use. Like, even with an Oculus Quest, you're like, okay, this is self-contained. It does everything. It's this lightweight wireless headset that, you know, meta will sell me.

Even with the Quest, you still have to sign up for your account, log into the thing, make sure it's charged up and has enough battery live. And with this, you plug it into the front of the PS5 you already own. There are no updates to download. It already happened that it's completely compatible with the thing. You get these instructions on your TV screen, how to put it on your head, make sure your controllers are paired, and then you're in. Yeah, like, I think that was what kind of really was compelling to me, watching the video, reading the review from you guys, was that my quest, if I don't use it for a couple of weeks and I go and I turn it on, one, will it have enough battery life or has my battery, like, discharged over the last year? The answer is no, it will not.

It will not have enough battery. And then two, I will almost certainly have to do at least like an update to the OS and an update to whatever game I want to play. And so it should be like takes me two minutes to get into the game. I'm now looking at 10 to 15 if the battery happens to be charged. If the battery doesn't have to be charged, I'm looking at I'm putting this away. I'm going to attempt it another day. Yeah. And I properly set up PS5.

We'll do all of that in the background. I also just think that meta has put so much emphasis on social lately that like every time. you try to get in at this point, if you're not using it constantly, like, they're just constantly trying to add new social stuff. Like, now you create a, you don't have to have a Facebook account, but you need a meta account. You need to like make your avatar. Hello, would you like to see things with your avatar? Would you like to be in social? No, I wouldn't. I just want to play games. Yeah. And the VR, the killer app for VR continues to be games. And this thing is just games. I don't know when it's not going to be just games, but we haven't found any metaverse experiences

that are particularly compelling yet. We've discussed this on previous podcast. But games have always been this, you know, I want to be inside this world that I already enjoy with my 2D flat screen, you know? Yeah. And this does that in a variety of ways. But the game catalog, it was kind of the weak spot in our review, too.

There are some really interesting experiences in here, but almost everything for the headset is being ported from somewhere else. I'm impressed by how little Sony cared about whether we cared about its launch lineup. They gave us like three games. And then we got some codes from other like developers. But we really, it's not just that the launch lineup is sort of limited. It's that we got access to just a tiny fraction of the launch lineup. The game codes are like now rolling in.

Like every morning, every morning, uh, Adi Atom and I would be in Slack frantically being like, are we going to have any games today? Are we actually going to know whether this PlayStation VR2 headset has enough games? Or are we just going to have to say we get to try enough of the games? And so the reality is there is one really good, interesting title that is maybe, I think, Eddie, you said it's like 85% of a full game called Horizon Call of the Mountain. And then there's a whole bunch of ports from other VR headsets, decent, maybe even good ports. Like Star Wars, Tales from the Galaxy's Edge is definitely higher fidelity. and smoother on PSVR 2, even though it's originally from Oculus Quest,

was designed to run on a mobile headset. Not a lot of brand new stuff, but then there's a handful of stuff that we haven't gotten to try yet that we know players are going to be very interested in. On launch day, there will be an update to Grand Turismo 7 that will let you play almost the entire game in VR. There will be an update to Resident Evil Village that will let you play the entire game in VR, as well as one for No Man's Sky. And, yeah, I don't know if we're going to love that. But as of today, we can't tell you.

Resident Evil 4 in VR ruled. Resident Evil 4, the GameCube game. So good in VR. But No Man Sky is coming to it. The Horizon Zero Dawn kind of spin-off game seems to be gorgeous. Like every piece of footage I've seen from it, I'm like, oh, that looks like a regular game, not a VR game, which tend to be like flat, like kind of ugly most VR games. Yeah, this is the first like AAA made for VR game in a while. Like we talk about it in the same breadth as Half Life Alex, which was the flagship title for the Valve Index VR headset for PCs.

And now you're getting that kind of PC graphics without having to buy a PC because the PlayStation 5 is basically a PC. Right. It's huge. It's powerful. It does those things. But I don't think we think it's quite on the level of Half Life Alex, right? I think that Alex was a game. Alex was a thing that they designed and they were like, this will be challenging.

This will be fully featured. This has a bunch of mechanics that we are willing to put into a thing that maybe people will fail in. This just felt like a game where they were really scared that people might have to restart a segment or something. And so there's all these climbing sections that could be really amazing if they were like the thing they are very clearly lifting from, which is Crytex the climb. But you don't have any of the mechanics that make them hard. And then there's combat that's a bow and arrow combat that I really love, I think is great. but you get it a couple times a level. It makes me so mad because it's so good when it's good.

But unlike Alex, it just doesn't feel like they were willing to quite commit to being a game instead of like a VR game. I was really impressed by Horizon, I think probably because it set me up to be disappointed. I started the game and I'm like, okay, I'm definitely not Aloi. And I'm sitting in this boat going on this awesome dinosaur safari, just going down this creek, seeing all these giant dinosaur robot things, step over me. It was great. And then I'm like, okay, this is just to me a Disneyland ride, right? And then all of a sudden, you can, like, walk and you can pull out a bow and you can climb things.

And it feels very immersive and everything looks beautiful. And at some point, you realize that all the climbing and shooting is very easy. And like, like Addie says in her review of the game, they've kind of sand it off all the edges because they're scared. And probably the same reason they're not letting you play as I like. But it's very impressive. I do think that anybody who picks up this headset should get the... the game. And so if anybody is reading this planning to buy the headset, you should probably get the bundle that comes with the game for $10 less than you would pay if you bought it separately.

But it's not quite like as much of a game as Half Life Alex. Okay. So this is one of our first headsets where we're getting eye tracking. And I think in climbing games, oftentimes I get a little nauseous playing those, partly because it's not tracking my eyes usually, right? And so I'm having to like crane my head and stuff. Do you have that, It's like not a lot of nausea with this game, not a lot of moments where you're like, oh, I don't feel good. It felt pretty like the movements and stuff felt pretty real. I get sick in VR. If the VR is bad, I have what's known as simulator sickness. Many people will get simulator sickness.

It's just simply, if I am being pointed in a direction in the game that I have not turned to point in the real world, I can get kind of sick because my vestibular system doesn't match up. There are other kinds of VR sickness you can get as well. But this one, this game, all of the walking, all of the climbing, all of the turning around, I was able to do, I can turn with my real body, I can move my real body, head and the directions that I want to move. And the game respects all that. It doesn't force me to use joysticks to turn around or anything like that. And so it was comfortable. The only exception was there are a few times I would get into a part of the game where it takes

control from you because it wants to do a cutscene-like thing. Like, hey, you are sneaking down into these bushes to ambush a robot dinosaur. And now we are going to point you in a certain direction. And I would come out of that cutscene and I would suddenly not be facing the same way that I thought I would be facing. And that's a little weird, but it didn't happen often enough. I played multiple hours and didn't really get sick. I tend to get sim sick and I was actually really surprised at how well the free motion worked.

I usually end up doing teleportation just because I find it more comfortable. But yeah, you do this sort of you're swinging your arms to move and you look very, very, very silly, I imagine. But it totally worked. It does. So you're like swinging your arms in real life. It's hilarious. It looks hilarious. I love it.

It looks like you're both running in place. Now, I would do this with old VR games, too. Like, this is a known technique that, like, VR developers and folks who researchers have studied for a while. If you get your body moving, it helps your vestibular system calm down or whatever. I'm totally butchering the medical terminology. Anyhow, I would raise and lower my feet to, like, fake walk when I was playing early VR games, and it would help me. And so it's cool to me to see that they have internalized that and made that, like, the actual games intentional locomotion. I like it.

It sounds like this is a very polished experience. That was one of the things, like you guys, I reviewed the PSVR, the original one back in the day. And one of the things I really liked about it was there was like a good amount of games. And it was clearly intended for the general masses, not just for us nerds who want to be at the cutting edge. And we were like, yeah, sometimes we'll feel like we want to throw up. And that's fine because we're at the cutting edge. And most people don't actually want to do that, which is shocking to me. And it sounds like this is for those people.

A lot of the VR fair is very simple, and many of them, if not all of them, but definitely many of the ones we tried, would ask you at the beginning, do you want to be seated? Do you want to be standing? One of my favorite games so far on the system, other than Horizon, is what the bat, which is a game where you are a girl whose arms have been turned into baseball bats. But that doesn't really matter. The plot doesn't matter. What matters is that you have baseball bats and you have to do all kinds of inane tasks, like pick up a piece of toast and drive. drop it into a toaster. Or smack baseballs into your neighbor's windows and break them. Yes. I got turned into a tiny baby with bats for arms, and they needed to splash my rubber ducky out of the tub with my bat hands.

And you can do all of that, like, pointed one direction without moving the rest of your body at all and just swinging your arms, and it is hilarious fun. What did you call this genre? You called it the Things for Arms genre? It's that in Tentacular? There are a number of games in VR historically that will be like, we're just going to turn your arms into something else and you're going to love it. And it works very well. That in the diorama genre where it's like you are going to be interacting with something that is very miniature

and cool looking like moths where you're controlling this mouse that's running through the forest. And you can look up and there's these, you know, giant trees all around you. But what you're looking at is the tiny nature scene unfolding beneath you in the bottom of the forest. So it's like this, you know, you're looking into this little world. I like that kind of genre too. Those kind of games are meant to get around that locomotion problem we were talking about, right? Like, if you're looking down at the diorama, that's just like how you would look down playing a board game or something rather than being in the board game. Yeah, it was one of the early games, like the first Rift games did it. It was the remnant from the Ashes team, Kronos.

Kronos. And there was a witchblade while back was a great side-scrolling rift game that was like everything is this, you know, you're looking into this diorama. It was a lot of fun. A bunch of games like that exist for VR and Moss are the flagship ones for the PlayStation VR2. The funny thing is that they are original PlayStation VR games that I believe you'll have to buy again in some cases. A number of original PlayStation VR games are coming back to the PlayStation VR2, but the PlayStation VR2 is not natively compatible with any PSVR titles. So their developers have to remake, remaster everything to use the different controllers, upscale to the graphics. that are available with PSVR 2, all of that.

So we are seeing a few games. We'll have you get the PS5 copy for free with your old PS4 copy. We're seeing somewhere like Thumper, which is a lovely rhythm game. Yeah, it's one of those non-VR games that's really great in VR. That one's a $5 upgrade. Res Infinite is like a $10 upgrade if you want the PS5, PSVR2 version. Sean, what's your take on why they didn't try to make any of it backwards compatible? Because it's not like Sony hasn't done that.

Like, they've actually historically been quite good at it often. I am a little bit torn here. Like, I kind of buy their explanation, which is that, you know, the control system is totally different in that, like, the original PlayStation VR, if you wanted to do anything with it, you basically had to hook up a webcam, right? You had to plug the PlayStation VR2 camera. That camera was tracking your head movements and your controller movements and Ken had to see all these things, and then it would translate that into movement. Whereas this is inside out cameras and tracking where the headset is the cameras. And so it is telling the system where it is in 3D space by mapping the world around it and saying, okay, I move this much to the left or this much to the right.

That's how much I turned. That's how much I moved. So that's where I am. Okay. But Oculus made that same transition between the Rift and the RiftS and they still maintain compatibility. It was like never even a question that they were going to break all their games because they suddenly switched from outside into Inside Out. Right. And I would think that whatever game engines these are running on, you could just feed whatever that real-time position of your head is and just have the system correspond to that.

I don't understand why not. I guess some of these games are trying to, like, have representations of your controllers in there, a few of them. But I don't think that would be a big deal to swap out, like, iconography and shit like that. Honestly, my conspiracy theory, which is that they had a bunch of games in their original catalog that were not particularly good because they were. were tech demos. This was like kind of just a flyer for them and that they didn't want to have to deal with people going back to them. Could be. Could be rights issues. Yeah, it feels like we don't want to have to pay to get all of these games working on this new system and they weren't that good anyway. So we're not going to waste the time. But if you want to do if you want to go and take your game and redo it for our system, great. And if you want to charge people because we're not going to pay you more power to you. That feels kind of like probably what the conversation was behind the scenes, right? It does mean we're going to lose the only from software VR game ever made, as far as I can tell. Deracine?

Yes, der Racine. I'm hoping some developers will tell us what it was like to port the games from PSVR to PSVR 2. Because I imagine, at some cases, it's going to be really easy for them. Particularly if they're using like a standard engine that allows you to output games to VR, like an Unreal Engine or a Unity, I would think that those just have selectors, hey, now make the PSVR2 version of my game, now make the Occupor. Giles version of my game. I've definitely heard that from, from developers in the somewhat distant past that would be relatively easy like that. And this system also is allowing you to just play regular games on it, too, like in a theater mode, right? Yes. Yeah. The cinematic mode,

when you put on the headset, what you see is you see a flat virtual television in front of you. That's the interface. It looks exactly like the PlayStation 5 interface when you put it on. The only difference is you're not looking at a real TV, you're looking at the fake virtual TV inside your headset. Two, that TV can get bigger or smaller if you wanted to. You can stretch it out to a giant, like, movie theater experience, like you're sitting five or six rows away from a movie theater screen. Or you can get it as small as, like, the 55-inch TV on your wall from your couch. You're seeing the regular PlayStation 5 interface. You pick the games like any other game. It's got the same settings menu, all that kind of stuff. When you launch a VR game, of course, then you transition into the 360

degree stereo 3D view of whatever your game is. But you don't have to. You can do those 2D games. If you are playing a normal PlayStation 5 game or a normal PlayStation 4 game on there, what you're looking at is you're looking at a 1080p image on that screen. So it's not as sharp as 4K. And also, you're getting a little bit of screen door effect because you're looking at magnified pixels of the PlayStation VR's screen that's inside. That's, you know, that's how it, VR works. And so it's a little bit grainyer than it would be on your regular TV, particularly if you got a 4K TV. With games like the original Horizon Zero Dawn on PlayStation 4, I found that it was like very grainy and very muddy, and I didn't like it, and I wouldn't have wanted to do more of that. But with PlayStation 5 games,

I played a bunch of Returnal in there. I was like, this is great. This is fine. Maybe it's not as crisp as my regular TV, but totally playable. And now it's on this giant screen. And I've got this movie theater experience. And you can do that for movies too. You can do that for Netflix shows. And you can do that for whatever other streaming apps are available on the PlayStation 5. They don't have any limits there. I played outer worlds on it, which I was surprised at how well it worked, because it's a very texty game. Yeah. Text and VR games can sometimes not be super sharp in the 360-degree stereo 3D environment, but on the 2D theater screen, it's seemed pretty legible. And that's because this is one of like the higher resolution screens we've had on a VR headset

in a while, right? I think it's a bit over average. It's 2K per eye roughly. It's not a billion times higher than average, but it's a really vivid panel. Yeah. It's not at much higher resolution than the Oculus Quest 2, which is like closer to like 1800 per I versus 2,000 per I. But like like how'd he's saying, like the.

panel is OLED, like the original PlayStation VR, mind you, but OLED's come a long way since then. The colors are really deep. Blacks, you can get nearly perfect black in this headset, which is not true of most headsets, including headsets that were previously using OLED, because you also get something with OLED screens called Godrays, where you've got these shafts of light that are kind of like coming into your eyes. Because of the lenses, a lot of heads. sets would use Fresnel lenses, which have ridges in them. They've got a whole array of different

prisms inside to make them lighter weight. They don't use as much glass as inside so they can be lighter way, not as heavy as other headsets. But the trade-off is that each of those ridges can catch some light. And Sony actually has a patent on the custom frenel lenses that they put in the PlayStation 2, where they've kind of like cushioned each of the ridges. You'd have to take a look at the patent to see what I mean, but they've kind of like cushioned each of the ridges so that The beams don't come at those angles that they hit your eye as much. The black makes for deeper blacks. Oh, that's fascinating.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that kind of keeps me from wanting to watch movies and stuff in VR is I'm very conscious of the fact that my iPad's going to be a better visual experience, nine times out of ten, right? Even on a plane with the person sitting next to be clearly able to watch my iPad, I'm usually more okay with that than having to sit there and be like, I'm consciously looking at like a small screen that's getting the helm. magnified out of it with the god rays literally. So this one, it seems like they've, they've kind of done that work there. They've kind of fixed, they've done the work to make it not quite as obvious to your brain that you're just looking through magnifying lenses at screens.

I wish that was 100%, but you're still going to get the screen door effect and you're still going to get the kind of slightly goggly, your field of view is about on average. Yeah, but it just, the colors are great. I just, I love them. Less god rays, deeper blacks, better colors, but also So there's this other thing about the lenses and all of us. Addy, you saw this, Tom saw this, I saw this. The sweet spot is really small. There's a tiny circle at the center of those Fresnel lenses where you see brilliant, you know, 4K resolution through that, 2,000 per eye. And it's super crisp.

And then if you turn your eyes or if the headset, you know, settles a little bit on your head and pulls it down a tiny amount, you get knocked out of that sweet spot very easily. It has one of the smaller spots, sweet spots, among the VR headsets we've tried. And so we were, all of us, were like, regularly adjusting the headsets on our heads so that we could get the sharpest image. I would probably do it maybe every five to ten minutes while I was playing. That seems right, yeah. It's not terrible. I got used to it, but like, it's a lot, you know? Yeah, that's a lot.

And none of you guys were wearing glasses while doing it, right? Yeah. None of us were wearing glasses. The glasses is one of those things that we still run into with VR. I'm wearing glasses right now. And sometimes I'm like, okay, my glasses are getting fogged because I'm playing supernatural and it's all sweaty. But also it's hard to fit them in there. And then it does affect that sweet spot with the glasses because you're suddenly having to do a lot more magnification and stuff.

I imagine there'd be some knock on effects there. While none of us used glasses, Scott Stein at Cienet has some of the thickest glasses I have ever seen. I used to work with him there. I've seen him in person. And they are big honking glasses. And he says this is the best headset for glasses that he's tried. Oh, that's wonderful. There's a lot of room in the eyebox.

Unlike, you know, Alex, you reviewed the original PlayStation VR. This is one of the very few headsets that allows you to slide the whole eye box in and out on rails. Yeah. The closer you get it to your eyes, the more field of view you get, the further away the less. But you can still see through it, no matter how far in or out it is. And that means that you can have room to fit your glasses in there. And between that and the lenses, it does a pretty decent job for him. So I was really happy that he managed to test it because he would know more than almost anyone else.

Okay. It sounds like it's much more comfortable for glasses wearers. But I do know that, Eddie, you kind of knocked on its comfort. Part of that was because it sounds like the headset wasn't just physically as comfortable as the original PSVR headset. And part of it was because you had a big old honking cord. So the headset weighs less than the original PSVR. But it also, it just feels balanced differently because this one has a bunch of front-facing cam. cameras, which is just a generational thing. I think we have an entire generation of VR headsets that

just kind of pull down the front of your face inevitably. It was still like definitely on the higher end of things that are comfortable. I could wear it for just really long stretches at a time after the last headset I reviewed was the Pro, the MetaQuest Pro, which was just misery. Like the original PSVR, you would put it on someone and they'd be like, wow, I didn't know VR could be this comfortable. This wasn't quite like that. This was more, it was good. It was above average. And then, yes, that, Heather, I hadn't realized how much I had gotten used to wireless headsets. I'm disappointed that the rumors that it was going to be wireless didn't pan out. All of us got tangled in the court.

Like, none of us tripped and fell on our faces or anything. But like, every one of us had to get, would turn one direction, be like, oh, there's something wrapping around my legs and have to turn the other direction to get out of it, which is not something you want to happen in the middle of an intensive game. Not that we played so many intensive games, but like when I start playing pistol, whip with this and we just got the codes today, I'm wondering whether I'm going to get tangled in this thing and pull my PS5 off the shelf because there is no strain relief or like quick detach feature at the end with the PS5. Like if you yank on that thing, it will pull your PS5. Fortunately, the court is quite long. Yeah, it's 14, 14.7 feet long. So it's, you know, this room that I'm in now, I can walk anywhere in this medium-sized room and be connected fairly well

and not have to worry about it too much unless I'm like turning around and around. But it's something to worry about. As an owner of a large dog, I would be probably a little worried about using it because large dogs love to be, they do not see courts. I've had like a PS3 and an Xbox 360 get just ripped off of a shelf because of dogs in courts. So this seems like potential disaster. The PSVR2 has a really cool pass-through system. You know, if you walk outside of your guardian boundary, just like with an Oculus quest, quest with a meta quest, it'll like show you, oh, you're outside. Here's what your real world

looks like again. But it does not have any feature that shows you when someone has come into your bubble. If a pet or a person walks into your space, the cameras do not see that. They do not look for that. They do not like, oh, hey, you should stop. There's something going on. You just keep on playing until they smack into you or vice versa. You got to play defensively. Be ready to punch someone at the face at all times. Fortunately, with the cable, no force on Earth could move the PlayStation 5. Actually, I had to borrow one with the kit because I didn't own one. I didn't realize how big they were.

I really hope they do wireless for the headset, and they do have a way to do it. So Sony did this teardown, their own teardown of the PlayStation VR2, and they showed that the entire headband is easily detachable from the iBox section up front. It has a detachable cable. the whole rail system that slides the headband out as detachable. And the headband is where the USB cord plugs into. So theoretically, they could take the screen and all the components of the PRSVR2 and plug them into a new different headband that could have a battery inside and wireless.

They could do it. They have the technology. How much would they charge us for that? Because the headset itself costs what? 550 for the headset, 500 for your PS5, and probably another 500 for the band, right? $150? How does the price feel on this? Because one of the super compelling things about the Quest, too, I think one of the reasons it was adopted so quickly was because of the price.

But the PSVR was also for years, it was like the best selling VR headset because it was easy to use. Are they kind of gambling on that people are going to find that ease of use to be good enough that they'll pay that extra money? I can't tell because it's, look, it's cheaper than PC VR headsets were for years before inflation. Like the original Oculus Rift was, I think, more expensive than this at the time. The problem is nothing can compete with the Quest because the Quest has been subsidized so heavily for so long. Like, HTC would like for a while just kind of get mad at you if you asked them because they'd be like it is ridiculous.

They are subsidizing this thing through advertising. You are the product here. That is why this is affordable. I don't know that it's sustainable for anybody else to go as low as the Quest, too. but it also, yeah, the fact remains this thing is a chunk of change. I think this would look really, really damn expensive compared to the Quest if the Quest was still $300 to start, but they raised their price by $100. And so now $400 of starting price for a Quest.

And so if you want to get into VR and you have nothing, no PC, no PS5, maybe you look at the Quest and are like, okay, this is most of the same games, most of the games I want to play are here. It's, you know, I don't have to buy all this other hardware. It's wireless. Great. But if you already have a PS5 sitting around and this is one of the best selling, look, it's on track to be one of the best selling consoles of all time, certainly with the fastest selling consoles of all time, then it's a lot easier to say, 150 bucks more than a quest, and I get way better graphics, and I get, you know, eye tracking, and I get this beautiful screen, and I do not get meta trying to sell ads against my eyeballs and whatever else, you know, you worry that meta might do.

And if you don't have a PS5 and you've got a PC, well, we really wish that this could plug into a PC too, because it can, electrically. You plug this thing into a PC. It'll show up as a 1080P panel for your PC. It'll show that you've got some unrecognized USB devices. The controllers show up at speakers. Don't ask me why. My PC thinks the sense controllers are speakers, but it does. That's basically what happened with the PSVR, right? That you could, end up adapting it to be a PC headset. Tom looked into this. Yeah, it didn't take long. Within the first three, four months, I want to say, the PlayStation VR, it was already a Windows headset. But they had apparently a lot of issues with controller tracking and maybe still do. So it does require, like, some thought.

Because the move controllers sucked. I mean, the move controllers were miserable. Speaking of the controllers, I just, I have to say I really like the plastic of these. I like how solid they feel. I think we're going to use the Quest 2 as our comparison here because that's the controller a lot of people have probably used. How do they shape up? How do you compare the two? Actually, I feel like they're just really solid plastic. I also, I think the face buttons are way tighter. That is the main thing I've noticed.

They're also a little hard to put on, though, because I'm not used to the fact that they feel upside down because you have to put this ring around the bottom of your wrist instead of over your knuckles. So you like put your hand through the ring to grab it? Yes, you put your hands through the ring. It's very sci-fi. Oh, boy. The one thing I don't like is the grip buttons. So it's got the grip buttons under your middle fingers, just like the Oculus Quest 2.

But the Oculus Quest 2, it's like a rest for your entire middle finger that gently, pillow-like, depresses into the grip. And once it's held down, there's basically no spring pressure on your finger, such a tiny amount, that you feel like you could hold it that way indefinitely. With the PlayStation, it's like a firm button. And so I'm holding down this firm button, but I want to let it go fairly quickly. So any game that requires me to hold an object for a long time

or any game where I get really, really greedy and just want to hold like five guns at once because that's a thing we do, I feel like I want to let go. It's annoying. How about the space this takes up in your cabinet? Like the PS5 takes up already a lot of space in the cabinet. Were you really hunting for a place to put this thing

when not in use? Bold of you would assume that I ever store things. That's basically where I'm going. from too. I have no idea where this thing goes. It's just lying in a pile on a shelf every time I put it away. Well, good luck, Sean. And thank you guys both for taking the time to chat about the PSVR. Everybody who's listening, you've got to go read the review, go watch the video. That was like the best way to start by morning the other day was watching that video. So thank you guys so much. We're going to take a quick break. And when we're back, we're going to get really, really nerdy

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Chris Welch, he's been like a scoop machine lately, and he's reporting on all those new Sonos speakers that are supposed to come out like in the next month or so. But Sonos isn't the only multi-room audio speaker out there right now. While it's still the gold standard, there are a lot of competitors. So I've gathered Chris, who knows everything about Sonos, even when they don't want him to know everything about sodas.

I do enjoy the products, but I also enjoy scooping them. Jen Tui, who is our expert on smart speakers from Amazon, Apple, and Google. I'm definitely going to help you out here with how they work on a daily basis because I use them all. And Chris Persson, who recently wrote about his love of a new audio device on the scene, The Wim, which is like this little puck that gives your old speakers multi-room audio superpowers. It's cool. It's a puck you get on Amazon for $80. Each of them have their own opinions, and I'm going to make them bite it out.

And this is going to be really, really fun. So I think the first question I want to ask is why Sonos, why whim, and then Jen, you go first. Me. Why Apple, Alexa, and Google? So I do use all three of the voice assistants in my home and a couple others. So we have Alexa with its multi-room music, Google Assistant with its multi-room music, and then Apple's Siri over Airplay. So Airplay is there multi-room music and you can control it with Siri. I think the most important thing to start out with when you're talking about multi-room music

is this is a proprietary mess. There is no simple solution. As Chris Person found out, there's ecosystem lock-in hard in this space. A few of the companies have tried to expand and provide much more sort of flexibility. But ultimately, you end up with the best experience, if you stick with the hardware of the manufacturer. For example, with Amazon's multi-room music, if you have all echo devices, and to be fair to them, and this is probably the biggest selling point, there are so many variations in so many different ways

you can play through an echo speaker. You've got the small speakers. You've got the little echo dots. You've got the echo big round, echo fourth gen. You've got fire TVs. There's so many that work great. And when you set up multi-room music, you can look in your app And it's like, oh, look at this. I have like 10 speakers in my house.

I can have this great multi-room music experience. They do work with quite a few third-party speakers as well. I've actually managed to get my multi-room music playing through my smoke alarm, which is really exciting. And my thermostat. So it works with the One Link Smoke Alarm and the Ecobee Thermostat if you enable Alexa. So, you know, there's a lot of options there. The problem I have always found with Amazon's, I'm trying not to say the name to set off everyone's devices. with Amazon's multi-room music using voice is there are issues with mesh networks.

It seems like when you have a mesh Wi-Fi network and you use multi-room music, it's very hard to get all of your devices working together. This is something Amazon can't really control, and this is even using their own Eero network. I've had the Eero mesh network, and I will set up multi-room music with multiple speakers, but only like three will show up. And then you select another one and the other three show up. You can't get them all on one because they're on different nodes.

I may be going in the weeds a bit here, but that's basically one of the biggest issues I've had using Amazon's multi-room music. But when it does work, it's probably one of the easiest to use. It's the easiest nomenclature to get it going. You can say, hey, Amazon's assistant, play me the latest Taylor Swift album, and away it will go. With Google, that is not the case. Oh! So Google has the same sort of basic setup. So you can use any Google speaker.

So you've got the Nest Hub, the Nest Max, the Nest Mini, the Nest Audio, and then some of the older Google Home speakers, any Chromecast-enabled speaker, so third-party speakers from like Lenovo. If you still have Chromecast Audio, all of those devices, they'll all work with multi-room music. The problem I have with using the Google system with voice is, if I ask, say, for the same thing, say, play me some Taylor Swift. I just this morning tested it out on one of my Nest Hub Maxes. And instead of playing the music everywhere, as I asked it to, it showed me a YouTube video of Taylor Swift.

So the nomenclature is the issue there. And there's different ways of using multi-room music. If the voice isn't your preferred option, of course you can do it through an app. And this is where the sort of ecosystem locking comes in. Spotify lets you play to any of these speakers. So if you have a Spotify account, you can use Alexa multi-room music. You can use Google's multi-room music. You can use Sonos.

And that works fine, but you're locked into Spotify. It's just a bit of a mess right now. I think people like flexibility, especially in their home, especially if you have more than one person in your home. You might want a different speaker in your room or you might want a different speaker in your kitchen. And right now it's so hard to find a simple solution that works reliably with multi-room music.

That's been my experience. And this was why I was so excited about Chris Persons article. In fact, when it came out, I tweeted it to my followers and I was like, I think some of you might have been looking for this. And there were a lot of positive responses because it's just a frustrating space. And just to wrap up the smart home side, and I know Chris Welch will help weigh in on this too because we just finished testing the home pods together. Obviously, Apple has its airplay system. And that is one of the systems that actually works the most reliably across speaker platforms. So you can use a number of different speakers without problems.

So you can have your Sonos, you can have Bose, you can have your Apple Homepods and Apple TV. So your TV speakers can kind of get in on the game. But it's less intuitive to control and you really relies on your iPhone. You can use the voice assistant, but it is not as intuitive in terms of, you know, commands to get it working. It can get real dumb. When I ask it to play music sometimes, it's like, No, you don't want to listen to Pippin. And I'm like, I do.

I'm the one person that wants to listen to Pippin. And it's like, we're going to play you some rock. And I was like, that's cool, I guess. No, I know. It's quite funny what each of the smart assistants will come up with when you ask for specific audio. They all have opinions and they're not good. And then the final piece of the puzzle, of course, is you can use Sonos with Amazon's assistant, but only Sonos speakers.

So you can set up a Sonos group in your Amazon Alexa app and play. and play music using one of your echo speakers, but only to sono speakers. So you can't, I'm almost 100% certain, correct me if I'm wrong, but my experience, you can only group sono speakers together using Alexa. You can't also add in like your Echo Studio if you have one with your Sonos beam. So that's kind of, again, that kind of frustrating, like, I've got these speakers and I want to be able to do this. But it's hard.

And I don't know, I mean, technically whether this is difficult thing to fix, to make or whether it's just the different companies are like locking in their proprietary systems and making it impossible to share. And I'm sure Chris Welch could probably fill us in on that. We need to go to Chris Welch because that's the beauty of Sonos, right? It is super proprietary. It is all one thing. But when it works. When it works, it works really well. And I'm not a big voice service person. So I don't like use their own voice service. I don't use Alexa and Sonos devices. I just use Sonos as its own thing. It's for music. It's for entertainment. It supports like all the services under the sun. And they have speakers for like so many use cases. A general way, Amazon has a ton of like different

price points and sizes. But Sonos has like different use cases, right? Like I've got the Sonos Rome for the shower, which you can't really do with any home pod or any kind of other gadget. I've got the Sonos arc for my living room, which sounds great playing music as well. I've got the Sonos play five on my desk for, you know, like proper sitting and listening to music and enjoying it. And I've got the move if I want to go outside and play music there. So like that kind of versatility of Sono. It's like it doesn't work great. Some people hate the app. I don't really mind it after all these years. I've gotten used to it. But yeah, when it works, it's just like, it just feels boundless in terms of like what you can do with it. And I think that's been the main draw to me.

But when it breaks. Yes. I just watch Chris Person like rise up. But Welch, first to you, then we'll go to person. So I'd say for me it's been like 85% consistent, which is a good average. But when you do have like cutouts or kind of issues, some people swear by plugging one of your Sonos speakers into Ethernet directly. And that creates like a small little private network for all of your Sonos gear. And so they do tend to talk to each other a lot better when you do that. So if you're having cutouts, try plugging in.

If that doesn't fix it, then I guess it's time to pursue something else. I know a lot of people were really challenged when Sonos moved from S1 to S2. they had two versions of the app. And originally they were like, if you were using the old app, all of the speakers on it will only work with the old app and will be dead to the new app. Then everybody was like, Sonos, do you know how much we spent? Absolutely not. And so they said, okay, if you've got the S2, your old stuff will work with it. It might be a little different.

And most people, I think, have migrated to S2 are using it. I've used it. I honestly, I use Airplay with my sono speakers more than I used the Sonos app at this point, which is why I was also. very interested in Chris's story where, because that's what you're doing with the whim. So, yeah, like, I don't know, my attitude towards Sonos is that I don't doubt that they're good devices and I've seen them around. They seem nice. But it's kind of like, do you remember the episode of The Simpsons when Kirk Van Houghton gets divorced and he's like, I sleep in a race car bed? And I'm like, I sleep in a big bed with my wife. It's like, okay, this is our generation's

bow's wave, which was a great sounding device. But if you talk to audiophiles at the time, they were like, I'm not using that because that's for children. You know what I mean? Like, and like, here's the thing. And I don't want to come off as like too condescending or something like that. It's just that I have a very specific thing where like I actually do have a couple of HomePod minis. I think they're pretty good. If you want to get whatever today's equivalent of a clock radio that you put in your kitchen is, they're great.

You know what I mean? They're great. Airplay 2 works. It also works really well because they broke it. Nerds hacked it. So now you can use it with everything. If Apple was, I don't want to say smart, but like, cool. they would do what they've been doing with MagSafe devices and just say, okay, everybody gets Airplay 2.

You know what I mean? Because that would just solve a lot of this. So too would fixing it with matter, I have a bunch of speakers already. I don't need to buy new speakers. I don't need to buy new speakers that have a thing in them that might not work in six years that has like a Wi-Fi chip that sucks in five years. I don't need that. Powered speakers are even like me kind of cheating. The idea it should be that like you create something that just gets audio to go to different places. And it should be something that we all agree works with each other. And the fact that none of these companies could do this is indicative of what they want to sell you, which is their own little gated community, their own little tiny, weird castle town that they live in. And, and I hate that

crap. I'm sorry. It makes me, it drives me up the wall. So basically, yeah, I started off like, okay how do I do this okay Chromecast used to be good I knew people who used to like hoard Airplay Express 2s because those actually got updated to Airplay 2 for a really long time so people were using like an Apple router that like had an ox out that nobody's used in years that nobody's using years because it was the only thing that they had for a really long time that just was like Airplay 2 plus optical audio out that's all people wanted and like Chromecast audio was pretty good for a while and then they're like we're not going to use this anymore And I wondered if that was like, because Sonos got lawsuity with them or if that had anything to do with it at all.

But like, this is the thing is like I think Sonos, the use case for Sonos long term isn't terribly strong. People are figuring this stuff out. What do they have that is special? And the answer is nothing. The way that Bose didn't have anything particularly special with its thing of them, the fact that it made kind of nice speakers that were good for most people because they were simple. And like, that's it. Now, Wilch, fight him. Ding, ding.

I mean, I think the simple option goes a long way. It always hasn't. It always will. Bo still sends a ton of products. You know, Sonos is doing very well. They are very defensive of their IP. I will admit that. They've had a lot of settlements over the years.

And there's their trial with Google starts in May. Yeah, because they were supposed to have the Google assistant. They do still have the assistant. But it's kind of like a, it's just a tense relationship. And like you can use their voice thing and you can use Alexa at the same time. You can't do that with Google assistant because Google, because Google apparently will not let anybody build like a multi kind of voice system with the system. But yeah, Sonos can be kind of lawsuity because I think they see this as like their whole thing.

You know, Chris, you said it kind of sucks. You kind of feel like it's for the Bose. I think in both cases, though, I knew a lot of people who use the Bose. I own the Sonos now. And I own the Sonos because I was like, oh, I want to do all this big stuff. Oh, I don't have the time and energy to figure out all of the big stuff. Sure. And so I went Sonos because it just works.

It just works. That's it. Will I one day replace my Sonas play base and my two ones with like actual towers and an amplifier that costs three times as much, but sound three times better? A hundred percent. If anybody has suggestions, please email me. But it also just worked. I plugged it in and it like went. But it sounds like it took you a very long time to kind of settle on this system that you have now. Did it take you a long time to set up that system? The whims, no. It takes like two seconds. It works really well. Oh no, Sonos. No, no. That's the funny part is that it works really well. It takes two seconds to like set up. It's like a little glitchy, but it never does the, like I was at a party with someone and they were DJing and the Sonos was involved and something bad happened. And man, it was not fun. It like kind of stopped the party for like 15 minutes while he had to like dig through cables and shit, you know, like plug it in and plug it. And it out like a router. The wind just works. I mean, like, that's the funny thing is that

like part of the way through this path was me being like, all right, I can currently buy a raspberry pie, which is not something you can do right now. Just walk into a microcenter and buy a raspberry pie. Let me see if somebody has hacked something together because I know nerds.

I've been on GitHub like today. They figure this stuff out. And the answer is like they're in as much of a pickle as I think us. Like there's one like called Snapcast that sort of worked. It was this long thing where I had to like follow what was functionally and instructables page to be like, all right, first you're going to do this.

And then you're going to get this hat for it. And like, it sort of worked. And then that eventually I moved on to doing somebody actually hacked Airplay 2 to work with these things. And that kind of worked. It got me sort of where I needed to go. You know what I mean? And then like a year goes by.

I'm kind of okay with this. Also, Airplay 2 is not like ideal because it's, it's not audiophile quality in terms of what it's doing. It caps at 44-1, I think, which most people won't hear that CD quality, whatever. But, like, for me, I have very specific reasons why I don't want that. That involve, like, toss-link timing and crap like that. But, like, you know, it does the thing you're talking about. And, like, that's the thing.

It's, like, I'm more amenable to the HomePod Mini because it knows what it is. It's pretty straightforward. It's simple to use. It integrates with the system that I have, including the wean. Like you're saying, AirPlay 2 is very, even though it's, like, still proprietary, kind of compatible with other things. it plays well with other things. And that's the thing that I think people are sort of moving to. And I hope we see with like Matter and stuff like that.

Like Matter TV we've pointed out is like a video codec, but it doesn't look like anybody's like aching to like make and matter audio. But that would solve this. Amazon's aching to. No one else is though. By the way, I did look it up. The Weem has the like Amazon Ultra HD audio. You know, that stuff works with it.

Like the other thing is like, yeah, Spotify Connect. The only thing it doesn't have, I think, is like, Chromecast in the Wii mini doesn't work, but it does in the pro. And then, like, I don't know, Apple music is just like proprietary, although they would be smart to put it on other devices. You know what I mean? But, like, that's the thing is, like, this thing can play music from my server. You can play it like 192 kilohertz 24 bit, like streaming flacks. Like, if you want that real pervert stuff, multi-room, you can do it with an $80 device.

It's over Wi-Fi. Well, no, the pro has Ethernet connections. So you can do it through that way, too. You know what I mean? Although my Wi-Fi is strong enough to support this. You know what I've made it? I've made it so. I love this.

And the other option is Roon, which is like for guys on audio science review, like literally for guys that post on audio forums. And Roon is really good, but you're paying money. Roon's an app, right? It's a service. It is a service you pay money for and they are really good. Like, that's the thing. People wouldn't pay money for this.

Guys on audio forums wouldn't pay money for this if it wasn't as good as they thought it was, which is like 386 kilohertz, you know, completely uncompleted, like lossless. They have their own thing called rat, R-A-A-T, which is their own audio transport codec that's like peerless, you know what I mean, and like

does the job. It works with Chromecast, weirdly. Like they got it to work with the Chromecast audios and works with Raspberry Pyes. But it does metadata cataloging, cloud stuff, and then like multi-room audio, and it does it really well. And that's why guys that own really

fancy high and speaker systems pay money for it because it's like if Plexamp was good. Yeah, that sounds like the service for movies where you can like pay to watch movies that are in theaters. Yeah. Yeah. Women are like pucks. They're pucks and you plug them into your speakers. Yeah, there's a puck and then there's a big box. And the box is 150.

So Rune, you go and you get a raspberry pie. You put a software on it. You plug that into speakers. You pay Rune a lot of money and it gives you like almost that Sonos experience if it just works. It's like if Sonos was good. Yeah. And Sonos subreddit is going to be very upset. I'm sorry, man.

They're like, you go, you go defend Sonos on like an audio forum and see where that gets. I mean, like, there's a couple of people. These people are sick. They love Logitech media server. They love like all of like DNLA. This is like when I go on the headphone servers with the AirPods. Yeah. I'm happy with my AirPods.

I like AirPods. But that's the thing. That's the weird thing. It's this middle ground that I don't like. So like Apple, I'm fine. fine with because they're experiencing a pretty good hardware renaissance they like you know it's fine your mom asks straight I get there like yeah sure

it's fine it's not it's not like a fire device or a Google device it's like the one smart home speaker I kind of think is okay and you can get them on sale at Costco or like the really perverted stuff where you get the thing you're supposed to get but the middle ground where you pay a lot of money for something that isn't the thing you want

is the thing that I have objections to especially if it only plays with itself well and that's the main space yeah that's the main space right now isn't it And we were talking about this on the last time I was on the verge cast with Nilai because the problem is these speakers do so many different things and they have all these different radios in them and that obviously is not an ideal environment for audio.

But ultimately things like the echo speakers and the nest audios and the minis, the home pod minis, they're really designed for the person that just wants to be able to get their music quickly and in their kitchen or in their bathroom and play it around the house. They're not really designed for the audio file. But we have been given this great experience. Like Amazon came out with the multi-room audio with its speakers really early on. And everyone was like, this is great.

And these are cheap compared to what we had to do with Sonos. And so we were offered this great experience, but the follow-through has not really been there. So now we're stuck with what's kind of a messy, complicated situation. And we need simple solutions. and Chris's solution sounds actually really simple, but I don't think it's the type of thing that most people are going to go out and buy just because it's an extra step. People want the simple, like, I have my speaker.

Why doesn't it do exactly what I want? I mean, not saying that multi-room audio never works because it does, but there are many, I said in my experience with Amazon's, like I was just testing it all out before we came on just to kind of refresh my memory on things. And I had it play music throughout the house, couldn't get it to work on every speaker. within three minutes it had just stopped for no particular reason. And that happens all the time.

I think it may be Wi-Fi-based because it's mesh. I don't know. I'm not a network engineer, but neither are the people that this is marketed to. It needs to just work. And Chris person mentioned Matter at least three times, so I need to jump on the Matter bandwagon again here. Because this, and I've spoken to both Chris's about this, this is something that potentially could be solved with Matter.

there is a casting spec in the MatterSpec, casting protocol. Amazon has jumped on it. We wrote about it a while ago. In fact, very recently, there's actually a certified device from Amazon that uses this Matter spec, but they won't tell me what it is. But we assume it's something to do with Fire TV, because there's two parts of this to casting. It can be casting your video to your TV or your audio to your speakers. And obviously Amazon needs a video casting solution because it doesn't have one and its competitors do. But it could, in the same vein, this casting spec could work across all of the speakers that you have that are matter enabled.

And all, you know what the one common thread is of every major tech manufacturers hubs that are in matter right now? They are also smart speakers. So it seems like, you know, we already have the infrastructure there, but there are two major roadblocks. The first is that smart speakers are not a matter device. And the second is there is a smart speaker working group in the matter system in the CSA. And it involves Sonos and Bose and a few other big audio names. And I'm assuming also Apple and Amazon and Google are involved in that because they're very much sort of running matter. They love matter.

Apparently, according to an unnamed source, that group has yet to actually do anything. They are just a group in name. There has been no impetus behind this group to actually move forward. And theorizing, having spoken to the Chris's about this, is that what's the benefit right now for Sonos or Bose to give away any of their proprietary tech? I mean, Apple did contribute HomeKit to matter, right? That's one of the basic foundations of the new Matter spec. So, you know, in theory, maybe they could also contribute Airplay or Sonos could could, could, tribute, it's proprietary tech. But again, there's a lot more money involved when it comes to

speakers and music streaming services than there is smart plugs. Yeah. And the person I spoke to said, ultimately, what's going to shift Sonos and Bose is consumer pressure. So the more people complain about, you know, not being able to use their other speakers with their fancy Sonos speakers, the more consumer pressure there is, the more likely these companies are to sort of have to start coming along playing the game. But, you know, whether or it ever happens, I think, you know, Matters got a lot of other things to sort out first. Okay, I've got to interrupt the multi-room audio discourse because we've got to take a break. And then we'll be back to talk more about the matter situation and dive even deeper on Sonos.

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Chris Welch, you have a keen inside knowledge over there at Sonos. You have an ability to just kind of figure out what they're working on. Are they thinking about matter?

Are you seeing anything from them that suggests that they have any interest in kind of changing their, their business model? I think they're taking a look at it. I think they're on the group or in the group. Right. You know, they're present. They haven't really just made any promises about, you know, what's coming or or any of that. I think, like, we're also seeing, talking about pressure that, like, might not really exist because, like, how many people own, like, several different platforms of these speakers, right? If you buy a Sonos, you're going to, that you're going to lean Sonos when you want a sound bar, when you want a portable speaker, you're going to buy the room. And so, like, once you commit to one, like, the odds of you straying from that and starting on, like, a home

pod is kind of strange. Yeah, it kind of feels like Sonos is in this space where Apple was for a very long time, where Apple was very, very expensive versus everybody else. So you had to have enough money to actually afford it. And but then when you did, it just worked. And so you're like, okay, well, it just works. So I'm going to, I've got enough money to afford it. So I'm going to stay in this ecosystem. And Sonos seems super comfortable doing the same thing, being like, look, we've really, we did one that does Atmos now. There's a rumor that they might be doing more speakers that fire upwards, more atmost enabled sneakers. Like, they recognize there's the demand, and they're going to meet it, but at their pace

and with their app. Right. Like, I would argue for the last few years, last year, at least, they're focused on, like, the lower end with the Sonos Ray and the Rome over the past couple of years. They've been trying to, like, slide downward. And now this year, they're going back upward toward the high end. So we're going to see some new speakers in the next few months. And I'm sure we're going to have the audiophile conversation all over again.

Like, is this audio file quality? Who knows? I think the Sonos 5 is. like the best sounding speaker among all the tech players at least. Like, it's better than a home pod. It's better than any studio from Amazon at Echo Studio. So, like, in terms of like, they're a pretty small company to, like, do that and to like have that footing is pretty decent. Honestly, the smartest thing they've done to me was all their stuff with IKEA. Like, they have a bunch of really solid IKEA smart home stuff and being like, hey, we want a foothold in what is very clearly an affordable

ecosystem that you are selling at like bulk for pretty, you know what I mean? Like, start I'm young as college students and get them hooked on Sonos right away. That's a smart move, but it also traps you into that. And I think a lot of those are airplay two devices too, which is also nice. You know what I mean? I don't necessarily want to own an IKEA speakers, but they're like apparently pretty okay. You know what I mean? Like they're not bad. I do think the question of like, you know, consumer pressure is one of like, how frustrated is your mom going to be when one one of these breaks and then she has to buy another one? Or like, you know, I think it's like the smart bulb thing. I mean, that's the reason why you're seeing matter

is because you have like people who don't pay enough attention to this who get something like home. And then they're like, oh, but this is a Wi-Fi bulb. Shouldn't it work? And then they're like, no, you have to get this other one. And it's like that's more frustrating to me. Like that is an actual point of pain for like normal consumers. And it goes against the whole it's just easy. It's like, yeah, it's just easy, but you have to get a thing that you use all the time.

And like it's that that's, I'm sorry. I'm done with that. I'm really. And I do think that like the very fact that it took this long. to get this little puck, it says a lot. It does a lot because it's something that like upwards of decades, it was just like, I just want a thing that you plug into a speaker and it works and it works over Wi-Fi. It's been like upwards of a decade of just people being like, oh, you can get that,

but it's like you got to get this like blue node amp and like it's expensive, but it works. And it's like, it's just more niche versions of that. And then like somebody was like, oh, okay, here's a Texas Instruments deck we put within like a Nordic Instruments, with an Nordic instrument chip or whatever. It's like, it's very, it wasn't that hard. And the fact, and it's like clown car stuff to me. It's like all these people trying to like do, solve all these problems when there was this one demand that people wanted. And when I posted that article, somebody responded with, I just did my system entirely Sonos.

And now I am regretting it. Because this is what I wanted. Because they were funneled into it. Yeah. That's exactly why I think. I mean, Chris, you're right. People now when they buy Sonos, they go Sonos. But because you kind of have to, I think Sonos would actually open it.

up to a wider market, which is what's happened with Matter. That's why everyone got together with Matter, because they're like, I think this is going to bring the smart home to a wider market. But if you could, if you already have five decent speakers around your home, like a few echo dots and maybe an Echo Studio, and you want a soundbar, you're not going to go buy a Sonos because it's not going to, you're not going to connect it with your other speakers in the same way, in this multi-room audio way. But if Sonos worked with those other speakers, you might go buy it. So, you know, I feel like, I mean, right now, it works great for people that are happy to either do an entire system in Sonos or swap out what they already have and get Sonos. But if you want to add to what you have or if you want to start small and build but want to have options, you can't really do that. I mean, you can to some extent, but it's not easy, as we've illustrated. We know the technology's there and we just, I feel like the companies, I understand that they've got their proprietary technology or, you know, they want to kind of keep you in their system.

but giving consumers choice is never going to be a bad thing in the long run. I think if you've got a good enough product, they will come to you if you give them that flexibility. You know, at the end of all this, I have probably 20 smarts because of my house. And I've bought and paid for an entire sono system because my husband loves it. And because it just works and he gets so frustrated with stuff that doesn't work. And I remember when I first started working at The Verge, he's like, does that mean you're not going to get to test any cool audio equipment? anymore. I'm like, no. I said, if you want that, you're just going to have to move in with Chris.

And so, you know, for Christmas, I got him the beam. And then this Christmas, I got him the big sub thing. And he loves it. And it just works. I'm going to say this. Like, you know, we can rag on Sonos's audio quality compared to like similarly priced dumb speakers. But that sub is mighty good. Put a sub and two play fives together. A whole house shakes. So much money on that sub. Well, it's good because, like, a lot of times subs can be kind of, I guess the word's floppy, right? Like, the base is there, but it overwhelms.

And it's a good tight, like, it really controls its base really, really nicely. So it never overwhelms, but it still gives you that kind of like in your chest rumble when whatever's happening and Dune is happening. So we covered the S1 and S2 stuff. I think they handled that poorly. They could have handled that better. but they still have the S1 app available. So think of Apple or Amazon maintaining the old version of their service.

Like just to keep old hardware running, it's kind of unthinkable. Right. So like I think like they only cut off actually one or two like ancient speakers. Like even the Play 3, I just died out of the office yesterday. That's on S2. That's got, you know, like all the current stuff. Yeah. The Playbase was kind of their first weird attempt at a speaker, right?

A flop. Different kind of sound bar. I know. That's still fully supported. And it's fully supported. And that was one of those things that, like, has kept me on Sonos as long as it has, is because that is supported. I'm not having to look. The minute that stops working because of, you know, something happens at Sonos, I'm out of that ecosystem because it's like, I now know that the whim exists.

And if I go and I get my own speakers and I plug them into the whim, I can have that same experience that with Sonos, I would have to go and get all my own speakers and then plug it into, is it the connect? And the amp, too. Yeah, and the amp. You can add all of your audio stuff. But it's cost like $4,500. And the whim costs how much, Chris? It's 80 or 90. I think they may have, it was on sale and then they like unsaled it when I published the

articles. It's like, eight or 90. I bet they did. Yeah, they're like, excuse us. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. But like, yeah, no, it's cheap.

You know what I mean? And if it's cool because like, even though it has like, it has an okay DAC, you know what I mean? It's like just a TI chip. It costs like five bucks or something like that. Yeah. But like because it has optical audio, if you have. if you're the kind of person who wants their own DAC, you just put the optical into whatever

good DAC you have, and then it will do the conversion there, which is part of the reason why guys own forums like it. It's because it's bit perfect, and it transfers it without re-encoding it, just straight up, like, this is the file, here you go, to whatever DAC digital audio converter you have. And like, yeah, it's a component. It's a part. You know what I mean? Like, I guess this is also like, I don't like soundbars. Like, I'm anti-soundbar for the same reason. shocked that you don't like some. But it's the same thing. Yeah, of course.

But like, but it's the same thing where it's this like too clever by half thing. Right. Either I'm going to listen to my TV with the speakers that are inside of it or I'm going to get real speakers. You know? Yeah. It's one or the other, even though I understand the form factor. No, I mean, and Sonos does have a, like you point out there, they do have a good ecosystem. Like I bought the original, is it S?

What's the original little small speaker that? There's now the SL. It's the one. Just the one originally? Yeah. So I have two of those that are my rear. And then I bought the, is it the beam is the most expensive? Or is the arc?

The arc. The arc. So we have the arc soundbar. And then we added the big boom, boom, boom. But those two ones I've had since like they came out. What, like in the early 2000s? I mean, how long have they been around? So that is great.

You are able to use all those parts together and that they haven't deprecated them. But as you say, if that time comes, which is the problem with all of these speakers though. I mean, we hit hard on this in The Verge and we should, but we need to know the lifespan of our technology. Like when you buy it, there should be like an expiration date. So you can be aware of how long you're going to have this product in your house. So that helps you figure out whether it's actually worth spending, you know, $800 on an arc.

Because there's been too many instances recently of companies coming up saying, oh, well, we've decided that's just going to last for another year and then you're out of luck. And that's another one of the consumer frustrations. And this is another area where matter could help because, you know, you could more easily replace a device, not have to spend the same amount of money and still have the same experience. So it's a tricky situation. And there is no, unfortunately right now, I don't feel like there is the perfect solution. I think we've got it, though.

Yeah, but I just don't honestly see a lot of regular people going out and spending $80 or $90 on this. I can't see my parents buying this and figuring out how to use it. it even if it is really easy. But this is the thing. It's like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, more, more difficult. It's just the idea of like, we, I'm sorry, this is just baked into the concept of the all-on-one. Like, I don't know. I go on Gov deals a lot, which is like government auction sites and I just see all the technology

waste going, like, you know, like, I walked into an e-waste recycling center recently and it was just racks and racks and apps and like, you know, these things that like people like buy. and then they're like, oh, it's broken. What do I do with it? And like, the more all in one you make it, the more waste you're going to make. That's just how it works. You know what I mean? Because we don't live in a culture anymore where these things can be discreet and we don't

live in anything where it's prioritized that like, you know, you're going to have a speaker. And if the speaker breaks, well, you go and get a fixed, you know, or you fix it yourself, ideally, which is what I would love is just people learning how to fix their own stuff. Like, the more all in one you make something, the worse it's going to be for the environment. just generally speaking. The worst is going to be for people because they're going to throw shit away and they're going to like,

no, just get back to like having a thing that does a thing and then a thing you can add to a little system and simplify it for people. And I think that there is a use case for that. Don't make it so that like there are these virtual things. Like even if you accept the all in one element of it, don't make it so that you also have to make it

so that people throw stuff away because it doesn't work with their other stuff because that's a thing that a mom will do is just throw it away because it doesn't work with their thing. And they're like, well, what's this then? I'll give it to goodwill or something. something. Chris Welch, what do you, what is your ultimate system? What do you use for multi-room music?

Like, when you aren't testing stuff? I mean, I've got a pretty small apartment here in Brooklyn. So I've got the Sonos 5 on my desk. Play 5, I bought that several years ago. It still sounds amazing. I've got the arc for my sound bar. I think so many people just want pretty good. Like Chris said, there's like a low end and a super high end at the middle. I think Sonos also shoots for the pretty, to very good range with the arc. Like, there would be no market for a $900 Sonos arc if it didn't sound pretty good. There would be no market for a $4.4. $1,400 Sennheiser Soundbar that I'm testing right now. If they didn't actually blow people away in some sense.

So I think, yeah, so I've got that, and I've got the room for the shower. And so I like my shower tunes and the move if I go work in the backyard on a nice day. I feel like no one's really cracked the shower. Sonos has said they're going to be in four new product categories over the next few years. So maybe a shower head speaker. I do agree, though, that that is probably the most compelling app. The Rome is actually probably the thing that, like, works the best because, like, the home pod minis don't, you have to plug me into a wall. And, like, some people just, like, have one plugged into the wall in their bathroom or something.

Like, they have little mounts for them and stuff, which is fine. Yeah, I've seen there's, like, mounts in the ceiling. Yeah. Or, like, you can just do weird stuff like that. But, like, I do agree that, like, airplay two devices that work well that are battery powered is a thing that I'm surprised Apple has not tackled yet, but in part because it probably messes with their home pod demographic. but like and also like there's plenty of Bluetooth speakers. They don't need to like make another one unless it has like a really strong use case. But they are making that weird mirror and that weird or that weird iPod.

What is it? Like iPads that are like for the kitchen, I think they were that was reported on. Oh yeah. That's the that's the rumor I think is that there's going to be like a home pod with an iPad attached to it. And we're all going to have them in our kitchen to make the best pies ever. Apple presumably. I do think the battery power is an interesting like Amazon got out of the battery powered speaker space. They had the tap, which was, I loved that thing.

And the Bose portable speaker is very good, but very expensive. But the Sonos move, like, you can buy a battery pack and swap it out. So when that battery built in dies, you can, like, keep it going. So that's kind of nice, not something you see very often. So I think they do a pretty decent job, like guaranteeing a pretty long lifespan for most of their products. I know how the Rome's going to be doing in, like, two years after the battery has been charged 100 times. Yeah, I think that'll be a really interesting one for Sonos to deal with. because it's their first battery-based product, right?

Yeah, that in the move, but you can swap out that battery. But yeah, I'm pretty excited for what's going to be coming up because they just bought a company in 2020 called Matt or Mate. That makes, like, super small transducers that put out big sound in a really small design. And we haven't seen the fruits of that purchase yet, but maybe this year. Okay, well, it sounds like we've kind of gotten a lay of the land. We know there's all this stuff like they're the smart speakers, and they're all doing their thing and they're doing it pretty well. There is Sonos who does it really, really well if you are willing to spend a lot of money. And then there is the whim and Roon audio, which honestly sounds like Sonos.

But for me, I'm going to go be basic and spend money on it, maybe. But it sounds like there's a lot of solutions out there. Nothing's perfect. Please go fix matter. Sonos and Bose, if you hear this, get your guys in the room with the other matter folks. Let's get on this. Let's fix this. Give Airplay 2 away, Apple, because what are you doing with it?

That would be the other solution. It would literally only benefit you to open that ecosystem up. I'm not joking. Okay, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you for listening. There's a whole lot more stuff from this conversation on Theverge.com. We put a bunch of links in the show notes. And if you have thoughts, feedbacks, feelings, tips,

you can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. Or you can call the hotline 866 Verge 11. That's 866 Verge 11. We may answer a question you have on a future episode. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. We are going to be back on Friday with some more of the Verge crew

to talk about all of the biggest tech news of the week. So I'll see you then.