The Sonos “Ultimate” home theater system requires a lot of manual labor

At this point, my very excited husband became much less excited. “He decided to let me handle it.” That’s fair, because it’s my job, but it’s not the attitude you’d expect from someone who had just weeks earlier considered all those boxes a miracle.

Side note: To factory reset a Sonos speaker, you need to unplug the power cord, then press and hold the Bluetooth button while plugging the power cord back in, then hold the Bluetooth button until the light on the front starts flashing orange and white. I had to do this several times for each speaker, and I also did it on the phone with Sonos support.

“I have a complaint,” I said. At the time, I had the Sonos subwoofer in one corner of my lap, holding the Bluetooth button on the front of the subwoofer with my left hand and fumbling with the connector on the bottom with my right. “I don’t think the factory reset method would be that difficult.”

“Ideally, a customer wouldn’t have to do this so often,” he said softly.

The final straw came when, after weeks of tinkering, I got everything working. I had one more thing to test, namely that once you’ve added the Sonos Ace headphones to the app, you can enable the TV Audio Swap feature—meaning you can listen to your TV’s audio on your Sonos Ace headphones without disturbing anyone else in the room.

I powered up the Ace (with a factory reset, of course, since my app couldn’t find the headphones the first two times it tried). Then I clicked Settings in the app and the Ace headphones. I couldn’t find the audio swap option. When I double-checked the instructions, I realized—to my dismay—that TV Audio Swap only worked with the Sonos iOS app.

After weeks of playing around I couldn’t stand the thought of having to do a factory reset Again to play the same trick on my iPhone. Apologies to those wanting to hear about the audio swap: I sat down to write this.

Give me some

The Sonos speakers work really well. When I finally got the whole thing set up and started playing Sabrina Carpenter in the living room, my 7-year-old son immediately ran in and started dancing. If you’re used to listening to metal TV speakers or setting a small Bluetooth speaker on the sink while you do dishes, the room-filling sound of a full home theater system is overwhelming.

Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ve seen it in the theater three times, and testing a home theater sound system is a convenient excuse to watch it over and over. I wouldn’t have believed how much of an experience the Sonos system was able to recreate with Dolby Atmos.