When Fenella asked me why the dining-room had no music source, it suddenly occurred to me that my Bowers & Wilkins wall-mount M-1 loudspeakers, lying in a box in the cellar, didn’t have to be mounted on the wall. They come with attachable base plates to allow them to stand on a desk. How did I forget that?
I had a spare Sonos ZP100 ZonePlayer and some speaker cables lying around, so everything I needed to set up a new zone in the conservatory was right under my nose. With that realisation, music was soon playing in that part of the house.
The sound was wishy-washy, though; we needed a subwoofer. After dropping Fenella and her children at the airport, I drove back via RAF in the Rijnstraat and purchased a Quake Q108 unit. We already have one of these in the living room and I’ve been pleased with the results.
The extra Sonos zone has been good for filling the vacuum of silence created by the departure of Eloïse’s cousins and their mum. Their visit was short and sweet, but long enough to make a large impact.
Still, the silver lining behind the cloud of this farewell is that we’ll no doubt see them all again quite soon, because they returned to England to live in January. I daresay we’ll see them again before the summer’s out, either here or in England.
Anyway, it’s nice to have the new zone in the conservatory. It serves the kitchen and the dining-room, too. The speakers in the living-room were just too far away to benefit the other rooms.
We had a total of six zones in the old house. This house now counts four. We were unable to reuse the built-in speakers situated throughout the house, so every room that I want to add music to has to have external speakers. As such, I’m postponing each purchase until we actually intend to put the room in question into proper use.
The conservatory zone becomes the first wireless zone in the house. I have only one network socket in the area and it’s currently being used to patch a phone through to the VoIP router in the stair cupboard downstairs. I may revisit this set-up later, but the range seems OK and I was able to listen to an Internet radio station for a prolonged period this afternoon with no drop-outs.
We do get a lot of pleasure from the Sonos system. I’m very glad we purchased it.