After a bruising year marked by a failed app launch, collapsing installer goodwill and the exit of its CEO, Sonos is attempting to steady the ship by returning to the channel that helped build the brand in Australia in the first place, the custom installation industry.
The US audio company has announced Amp Multi, its first new product aimed squarely at professional installers in more than 12 months — a conspicuous gap that had fuelled frustration among integrators who once championed Sonos before the company’s aggressive shift to direct-to-consumer sales and a big exclusive deal with JB Hi Fi that saw Sonos sold in the mass channel at the expense of the custom install channel who had helped launch the Sonos brand when it was distributed by Melbourne based Niv Novack.
The new offering is distributed by Westan and is set to retail for $5,000 which is seen as expensive.
The timing of the announcement, made just days ahead of Sonos’ next financial results on February 3, appears far from accidental. While the company has not confirmed a launch date or pricing, the message is clear: Sonos wants installers back on side.
A product for the trade — not the living room
Amp Multi is not a consumer product in any traditional sense. It is a rack-mountable, professional-grade digital amplifier designed for large residential installations, multi-room audio systems and high-end smart homes.
The amplifier delivers eight 125-watt amplified outputs across four independently configurable zones, with each channel capable of driving up to three Sonos Architectural speakers. That puts it well beyond the needs of the average household and firmly into the realm of custom installation, where scale, zoning flexibility and discreet hardware matter.
For apartment dwellers or casual Sonos users, Amp Multi would be extreme overkill. Even the existing Sonos Amp — itself hardly a mass-market device — would be excessive in most homes. Amp Multi is designed for larger residences where audio needs to be distributed intelligently, reliably and invisibly.
In Australia, the product will be distributed by Melbourne-based Westan, reinforcing its positioning as a specialist product for the trade rather than a big-box retail item.
Re-engaging an alienated channel
For many installers, the announcement lands as both a welcome development and a tacit admission of past mistakes.
Custom installers were among the earliest adopters of Sonos when the brand launched in Australia, helping to embed its wireless multi-room audio systems into high-end residential projects. That relationship began to fray as Sonos increasingly prioritised direct sales, retail partnerships and consumer hardware — often at the expense of the CI channel.
Over time, many installers quietly walked away.
Amp Multi is Sonos’ clearest signal yet that it understands the cost of that shift.
Unlike the standard Sonos Amp, which can power only a single zone, Amp Multi allows installers to configure up to four zones from a single chassis, dramatically reducing rack space while increasing system flexibility. The unit is designed to be hidden away, integrated into equipment racks and deployed as part of a broader smart-home architecture.
“Amp Multi helps accelerate that shift by giving us more ways to be built into the architecture of the home, not just added onto it,” a Sonos spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg. “It allows installers to create bespoke audio solutions for their clients.”
A company still recovering from self-inflicted damage
The product launch comes after what has been one of the most damaging periods in Sonos’ history.
In mid-2025, the company released a heavily redesigned app that was widely criticised for being unfinished, unstable and missing core functionality. The backlash was swift. Customers complained. Installers lost confidence. Revenues fell sharply.
Tom Conrad Sonos CEO
The fallout ultimately led to the departure of CEO Patrick Spence, who was replaced in January by Tom Conrad, a long-time Sonos executive and board member. One industry analyst described the company’s current phase as operating in “mop-up Spence’s mess mode.”
Sonos has been unusually quiet since the app debacle, releasing no major consumer hardware since the Arc Ultra soundbar in late 2024. Internally, projects were paused, priorities reassessed and at least one major initiative scrapped.
One of Conrad’s first decisions was to shelve a streaming video player that Sonos had spent years developing — a move that contributed to the long gap in new consumer-facing hardware but was seen by some as a necessary act of discipline.
Amp Multi, while newly announced, is understood to be one of several products conceived under the previous leadership that survived the strategic reset.
A narrower, more pragmatic strategy
Conrad has been explicit about his vision for Sonos, describing it as an effort to “unite every dimension of sound” into a system that is both cohesive and radically simple. Notably, that vision does not rely on chasing entirely new product categories.
Instead, Sonos is betting that growth will come from selling more devices into existing households, rather than endlessly expanding the user base.
During a November earnings call, Conrad outlined a strikingly direct commercial thesis: Sonos sees a US$5 billion revenue opportunity in increasing the average number of devices per multi-product household to six, and another US$7 billion opportunity in converting single-product households into multi-product customers.
That strategy depends heavily on whole-home audio — and whole-home audio, particularly at the premium end of the market, still relies on professional installers.
What comes next
Sonos says hardware launches will begin to ramp up in the second half of fiscal 2026, and whatever follows Amp Multi is expected to have broader consumer appeal. But for now, the company appears focused on rebuilding credibility rather than chasing headlines.
Amp Multi will not fix Sonos’ problems overnight. It won’t erase the damage done by the app debacle, nor will it immediately win back installers who feel burned by years of channel conflict. But it is a meaningful gesture — and perhaps the most tangible evidence yet that Sonos understands where it went wrong.
For a company that built its reputation on being installer-friendly before turning its back on the trade, Amp Multi looks less like a new product and more like an olive branch.
