Sonos Era 100 as powered speaker for WiiM

[timmo]

With the 20% off sale Sonos is running now, I can get a Sonos Era 100 for $200. Thinking about replacing my IKEA SYMFONISK (gen1) speaker for the Era 100, and use the line-in input with a WiiM (mini for now, but Pro Plus down the line). The Era 100 offers a lot more flexibility for a powered speaker and that’s a pretty darn good price (Bluetooth, line-in, Airplay2, stereo sound). Good idea?

The downside is I‘ll have to update all my Sonos speakers to S2 (from S1), losing my Sonos Connect (S1 only). BUT … I can probably live with that as I have a WiiM Pro Plus connected to the same powered speakers as the Connect (the speakers have two separate inputs).

 

[timmo]

An update to my experiment (in short: a failure). I got the Era 100 and love it - great sounding speaker. I updated my whole Sonos system from S1 to S2 (my Connect stays at S1). I was hoping to use the Era 100 as both a Sonos system speaker AND as just a ‘dumb’ powered speaker for WiiM using the line-in input. I was hoping to play music to all my WiiMs in sync, but the Era 100 has latency when using the line-in input (even if you’re not grouping it with any other Sonos speakers while playing WiiM via line-in). I should have researched this more prior to buying the Era 100 as I have subsequently found tons of posts on Sonos forums about this exact issue (latency for line-in inputs regardless of speaker groupings).

What I did learn in viewing those Sonos posts:

• All Sonos speakers with inputs have latency, even if you only stream to the one speaker
  • EXCEPTION: You can use a Sonos Ray or Beam instead which has optical inputs and have zero latency (because it’s a “TV speaker” so they don’t have latency in order to avoid lip sync issues). Problem is I don’t want that size/type of speaker, but it’s a workaround that supposedly works for what I was trying to do.

’Smart’ powered speakers that DO work for what I’m trying to do (i.e. they have zero latency for line-in inputs):

• Echo Studio (great speaker - I love this one, sounds great and it works very well … no latency)
• Denon HEOS smart speakers (I don’t have any experience, but I read that they have zero latency when using line-in)
• Not sure of others?

Issue is that I want to keep my Sonos system going (so I thought the Era 100/300s were going to be perfect to bridge both systems and future-proof the best I can), but I don’t want to introduce yet another speaker ecosystem like HEOS, etc. (I just want to basically have WiiMs and Sonos in play).

Anywho … just wanted to share in case anyone cares and finds this useful