These are the things Sonos owners actually ask, answered plainly. Where Somos cannot do something, it says so — there is a list of what we can’t do and why.
The crossover is the point where bass hands over from your speakers to the sub. Sonos does not put this control in its own app, so most owners never find it. Somos InControl shows it as a slider you set in hertz, anywhere from 50 Hz up to 110 Hz, and the change applies the moment you move it. One honest caveat: not every Sonos model accepts a crossover setting. The speakers that hide the control are refusing the setting at the hardware level, not missing it in the app — an Amp is the clearest case where it works. If the slider does not appear for your system, that is the speaker's answer, and no app can override it.
Sonos gives you one blunt surround level. Somos InControl gives you the real controls: the rear surround level, the height channel level on soundbars that have upward drivers, and the sub level, each on its own slider that applies live as you drag it. There is a separate music surround level too, so your rears can sit at one level for films and another for music without you touching anything when you switch. You can also switch the surrounds off entirely, and choose whether they play ambient or full sound during music.
Yes, and this is the feature people come to Somos for. Sonos does not offer dedicated front left and right speakers alongside a soundbar. Somos InControl sets them up for you, including single and mismatched pairs that the official app will not allow. The whole home theatre arrangement — fronts, rears, sub — is built and rebuilt from one screen, and a diagram shows what is currently bonded to what. Setting up or tearing down a home theatre takes seconds rather than a trip through several menus.
Speech Boost, which Sonos also calls dialogue enhancement, is a single toggle on the room page in Somos InControl, next to Night Sound. On Arc-class soundbars that support a level rather than a simple on-off, you get the level as a slider instead. Somos sets the value, reads it straight back from the speaker, and tells you if the speaker refused the change rather than showing you a switch that has moved when the sound has not. You can also save either one into a preset and load it from your phone's Lock Screen.
Yes. Somos InControl lets you save the whole sound state of a room as a preset — the EQ, the surround and height levels, the sub level, Night Sound, Speech Boost, Loudness, and the volume — and bring it all back with one tap. Most people keep one for films, one for music and one for late at night. Presets work on music-only rooms as well as rooms with a soundbar. Sonos has nothing equivalent; without it you are moving the same handful of sliders back and forth by hand every time the room changes job.
The usual cause is two systems on one network. Older Sonos gear runs on the S1 platform and newer gear on S2, and an app that assumes one household will show you one set of rooms and quietly drop the other. Somos InControl resolves every household on your network before it draws the room list, so both systems appear together. The other common cause is UPnP being switched off in the Sonos app (Account › Privacy & Security), which stops any controller finding speakers at all. If rooms are still missing after that, the support form on this site is the fastest way to get it looked at.
Somos InControl is one, and it is built by one person who owns the speakers he writes for. Speaker control runs entirely on your local network — no Sonos account, no cloud service, and nothing about you leaves your house: a music service you link talks to that service instead (see Privacy). It is a remote for the settings Sonos does not expose: crossover, per-channel surround and height levels, front speakers, saveable sound presets and the current audio format. It is an iPhone and iPad app, currently in open beta through Apple's TestFlight, and an Android version is in early development.
Yes. Somos InControl creates and breaks stereo pairs directly, and it will pair speakers the official app refuses to put together. It also handles the harder cases around a home theatre — releasing a speaker from one role and giving it another, with a rename step so you are not left with a room called something that no longer makes sense. Every change is applied to the speakers themselves, so it shows up in the Sonos app afterwards exactly as if Sonos had done it.
The support form reaches a real person, and the documentation goes deeper on every screen. If you want something that is not here, ask for it — the list on that page is built entirely from what people have asked for.
Somos InControl