A VC: Sonos Rocks

Thanks for the review. I've been ready to buy one of these systems since October but was waiting to finish remodeling and then wanted to see what else might come out. Then I saw on Engadget that there were coming out with zone players that didn't have the amp built in and with video support. This would be much better for at least 2 of the systems given my existing stereo equipment. How did you handle this?

I also wanted to see the most recent Apple updates on the Mac Mini being a full media server with seamless integration throughout the house. Although they are going down the path, the most recent address has them focussed on mass market and not higher end systems.

Basically, I want to be able to serve multiple floors with music (and preferably video) from anywhere in the house and to either play throughout all which seems to be such a cool feature for entertaining or to be able to play multiple selections simultaneously regardless of where the original media resides (including external devices like phonograph or a CD player).

Does anyone know when Sonos plans to release these new zone players?

Thanks.

Posted by: Chris Robison | March 19, 2006 at 07:48 AM

Would Slimserver/SlimDevices be a better set up, especially for DRM'd music?
( http://www.slimdevices.com/index.html )

Plus the server is free ...

Posted by: Ric | March 20, 2006 at 12:17 AM

I've been using slimdevices stuff for quite some time (my first one, the early wired version called SLIMP3, seems little more than a protoboard). We have 3 of them now, 1 wired, 2 wireless.

The guts are great, but...

Slim's remotes are weak.

Slim's on screen UI's are weak.

But slim server is open source, so if someone wants to do it better, they can. If one were so inspired (and had a bunch of time) one could make a killer iPaq client to control a slimserver.

Sonos' UI looks very clean and very well thought out.

Posted by: Erik Schwartz | March 20, 2006 at 09:56 AM

I've been waffling between the Sonos system, Squeezebox, and hacking something up myself for a while. Neither Sonos nor Squeezebox is quite perfect.

The Sonos system seems fine for a single-person household, but in cases where you have multiple ZonePlayers and you want different people in different rooms to be able to choose music and view what's playing it's not so great. Each person needs a $400 controller (I've heard of people buying Nokia minitablets for the same price and using those instead) or a computer, which is silly. At the least, each ZonePlayer should have controls and display on par with the grayscale iPods for that price.

OTOH, the Squeezebox doesn't provide an amplified option, and there's no line-in. I really like the Sonos line in, becuase it should allow me to take the audio output from my main stereo (my TV, DVDs, or whatever) and pipe it through the rest of the my house. With the Squeezebox, I'm restricted to piping audio that originates from a computer, which is too restrictive for my tastes.

At this point, I'm holding out for a system that provides controls and displays in each room and allows me to input audio from non-commputer sources. I expect to end up with a Mini in the living room at some point but that doesn't solve the problems in the other rooms.

Posted by: Luke Kanies | March 20, 2006 at 01:46 PM

if you're looking at Sonos, you should also look at netstreams (www.netstreams.com) -- though I think it's an even higher-end, pricier solution than Sonos with a few fancy features (multi-room audio sync, etc)

Posted by: just.a.guy | March 20, 2006 at 03:49 PM

You also might want to take a look at the products from Control4. www.control4.com. They have the controls and displays for each room, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, and wired ethernet, plus you can do lighting and other home automation functions.

Posted by: Craig Plunkett | March 21, 2006 at 12:30 AM

Sonos does indeed rock, The internet radio stations are implemented perfectly - I'm an audio visual installer here in Phuket, Thailand - Working on smarthome automation and clever audio solutions, since Sonos has come along its solved almost any problems I've had with source selection on MP3's previously.

We've installed probably about 100 Sonos boxes now, we've never had a problem with a single box - even when trying to do some rather clever things with them (hybrid wired/wireless carrying Internet signals to other computers and running of NAS Hard Drives).

We've yet to really install one hooked up to a PC, most people want them installed alongside a NAS box for stability (just about 100% so far).

Its so great to be able to listen to British radio stations so easily whilst living here in Phuket, Thailand.

Ben Hobbs
http://www.h3-digital.com

Posted by: Ben Hobbs | April 05, 2006 at 04:01 PM

hey there -- glad you like the rhapsody/sonos combo. i work for rhapsody and we think it's a pretty sweet pairing. one thing i did want to comment on from your post: you don't need rhapsody 3.0 to use the sonos system. the back-end technology that makes it work --the universal plug and play standard, or UPnP for short-- was built into the service in between versions 2 and 3.

Posted by: matt | April 13, 2006 at 01:19 PM

Fred,

Good write-up on Sonos. Thanks for the Control4 plug Craig. I've been analyzing Sonos as a competitor to Control4 and have been impressed with their product. I also really liked the internet radio - very cool.

For an affordable whole-home solution, I'd really recommend Control4. As a VC :) you can probably afford a custom Crestron system, but Control4 is really targeted to the broad market as a platform for the digital home. We not only do multi-room music, we also do lights, temperature control, movies and security integration. You could say that our "clock speed" is off the charts. Anyway, I'll stop my shameless plug of the company I work for. Keep up the good work.

Posted by: Darren Johnson | August 01, 2006 at 12:04 AM

I would say Sonos and Control4 has different pros and cons. Anyway, Sonos's driver to allow it to work with control4 system has been in the market for about 6 months now.

I am an integrator in Thailand and have used both of them in our installation. Which one is better? I would say it depends on the application.

Pirot - Thailand

http://wwww.exzelsmarthome.com

Posted by: Pirot | June 23, 2010 at 12:42 AM

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Mar 19, 2006
Sonos Rocks

Img_0100 As part of the advertising deal with Sonos to sponsor the "In Heavy Rotation" list on the left sidebar of this blog, I asked for a Sonos system to setup, test, and review. I got the system a couple days ago and spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon setting it up. Now I am done and happily sitting in my kitchen listening to my favorite radio station, WEHM, over the Sonos system.

The way to think of Sonos is an iPod for your home stereo system. The handheld wireless controller (shown in the first picture on this post) works a lot like an iPod, it has a scroll wheel, a very nice display that shows album art work, and a bunch of other useful buttons.

Img_0098 The controller allows you to access the digital music files and services that are on a computer in your home and play them through the equivalent of a home stereo. The Sonos Zone Player (seen in the picture on the left) is the heart of the system. It connects to your computer (via an ethernet connection) finds the music and the music services and build links to them.

You can connect the Sonos Zone Player to an existing set of speakers or to a multi-room audio system, or you can order speakers directly from Sonos.

If you have more than one place you want to play music in your house and you don't have a multi-room system, then you can get a second, third, fourth, Zone Player and they all synch with each other. You only have to setup the first one. The setup Sonos sent me was two zone players, one controller, one controller cradle, and two sets of speakers. They came in a bunch of boxes.

The setup was pretty straightforward. I picked a windows machine that has the Rhapsody music service on it, and put the first Zone Player next to it. It happens to be in a rack I have in my basement near my router and other equipment, but you could put it anywhere in the house. The Zone Players are a little bit bigger than a Mac Mini.

You connect the first Zone Player to your network with ethernet. They don't want you to use wifi. I think there's a way to work with an all wifi home, but that wasn't a problem for me.

Img_0096 Then you install the Desktop Controller software on the machine that has your music library and/or your music service on it. The only music service I know for sure that Sonos works with is Rhapsody. The installation was about as simple as it could be. The software finds the first Zone Player and then you tell it where to look for your music library. My configuration was particularly tricky because my music library is not on my computer, its on a set of audio request music servers. But I was able to browse easily through my network from within the Desktop Controller software to find the music server and Sonos indexed the files.

If you want Sonos to work with Rhapsody, you need Rhapsody 3.0 which can act as a server and you need to make sure its configured properly. I had to upgrade from Rhapsody 2.0 to 3.0 and after I did that, it was preconfigured to be a server, but changing the configuration isn't very hard if you need to do that. It is a matter of checking a single box.

If you only have one Zone Player, you are done at this point. if you have a second Zone Player, as I do in my kitchen, then you need to find an out of the way place for it and plug it in. The second and any additional Zone Players can connect to the first Zone Player via wifi so it matters a lot less where you put them. They just need power.

Img_0106 Then you connect the cradle to power and put the Wireless Controller in the cradle. I selected a section of the shelves in our kitchen for the cradle and that worked pretty nicely. The Wireless Controller is about the size of a 4x6 picture frame.

So that's all there is to setting it up. My process went pretty much without a hitch. The one small issue was that I have a personal firewall on the computer I put the Desktop Controller software on. The controller software identified the potential problem and I called support and they gave me some ports that I needed to open up on my firewall. Other than that, I'd say it was a pretty simple and painless process. It took me about an hour to do the software, two Zone Players, and the Wireless Controller.

I don't really need the main feature of the Sonos which is to give you an easy and convenient way to play your music library on your computer over a home stereo system with a wireless controller. I have the music servers in my house connected to a crestron system so I have had that ability for a while now. But the Sonos does basically the same thing for about a third of the price of the servers and you don't need a crestron system at all. Had Sonos been around five years ago, I may well have gone with it instead.

The two things I love the Sonos for are the ability to play Rhapsody through a home stereo system and the ability to play Internet radio the same way. I use Rhapsody all the time on my computer but we have had a hard time finding an easy way to get it onto our multi-room audio system. Sonos solved that problem for me. That's what I was hoping it would do when I asked them to send me one to try out.

Img_0108 The big surprise was Internet radio. I didn't know Sonos had a good solution for that. Sonos comes preconfigured with many of the most popular Internet radio stations like KEXP and KCRW. But you can input any audio stream URL into the controller software and its automatically added to your favorites. I did that this afternoon with WEHM and have been listening every since to my favorite radio station just like I listen to it on Long Island. Awesome!

Now I know some of you are going to think, "Fred's shilling for Sonos now". It's true that Sonos is advertising on this blog, but I am giving the money to charity and I certainly wouldn't promote a product or service to all of you that really sucks.

There are two things I wish were different about Sonos. The first is that you can't search for new artists on Rhapsody from the Sonos controller. You can only play artists, albums, tracks, and playlists that you have saved. That means you have to use the Rhapsody client to find new artists and save them before you can play them on Sonos. If there were one thing I'd urge Sonos to fix, that would be it.

The other issue is not a problem for me, but is something that could affect many potential Sonos users. If you have a music library consisting of songs bought from iTunes or another online store that uses DRM (like Microsoft's Play For Sure), you won't be able to play them with Sonos. This is not Sonos' fault, it's one of the many reasons DRM sucks. The bottom line is if you buy songs from iTunes, you are getting locked into iTunes, iPod, and the apple ecosystem. Not enough people understand this issue and they should.

My biggest concern is the cost. The system I got, the Introductory Bundle, costs $1200 from Sonos. You may be able to get it for less somewhere else. And if you need more than two zones, each Zone Player is $500 and each Wireless Controller is $400. So this is a premium product. But it delivered a premium experience for me and if you are looking for a simple, elegant solution for integrating digital music and music services like Rhapsody and Internet radio into your home audio system, you should give Sonos a really good look.

It rocks.
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A little while back, in a post I wrote about the Dis-Connected Home, I mentioned how Sonos and Windows Media Center seemed like candidates to help connect the home, but appeared to be too costly. The folks at Sonos offered [Read More]

Tracked on Apr 2, 2006 11:06:46 PM
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