A few days ago, we had a Sonos system installed in our house. Six ZP100 ZonePlayers make for six so-called zones in the house, one per major room on each floor, and we have three CR100 controllers, one per floor, to control the music in that floor’s two zones.
Each zone allows separate music to be played in that zone, meaning that we can have six different audio sources booming out around the house. In practice, we’re unlikely to do this.
One nice feature of the system is the ability to link zones, so that the same music can be played, for example, in both the living-room and the sitting-room. Then, if someone else wants to use one of those two rooms, you just drop one of the zones from the link group. This means that you can add zone B to zone A, then drop zone A from the group, which effectively allows you to pass music sources between zones. Very clever.
The zone system is very sensibly implemented and it’s therefore possible to control any zone in the house from any of the remote controllers. So, I can be in the living-room on the ground floor and turn on music in the guest room two floors higher up. The logical extension of this idea is setting alarms, so that music can be automatically be made to play in any zone at any time. Again, the simplicity of the software makes this child’s play to configure.
After a session in the listening room of the hi-fi shop (where Sarah was close to vomiting and Eloïse was going mental to go home: not a terribly relaxing environment for listening and making well-informed decisions), we finally settled on a mixture of KEF, Bowers & Wilkins and Paradigm speakers for the house. The living-room has the KEF pillar speakers, whilst the sitting-room has B & W speakers hung in the corners. A REL Quake subwoofer completes the picture in the sitting-room.
The first floor rooms already contained built-in speakers, left behind by the previous owners, so we simply hooked up the two ZP100 ZonePlayers to those. We think they’re B & W, but we’re not sure. They sound pretty good; good enough for bedrooms, at any rate.
The second floor has the Paradigm pillar speakers in the guest-room. In the office, I simply hooked up the ZP100 up to the line-in socket on my computer’s sound card, which plays through some fairly decent Klipsch speakers. Most of the time I’m in there, it’s late at night and I have to listen on headphones, anyway. I may get better speakers for the office later on, if the need arises.
The ZP100 in the sitting-room is wired over Ethernet; the other five operate wirelessly over an AES-encrypted protocol on top of 802.11 (which Sonos calls Sonosnet). The single Ethernet-wired ZonePlayer is an installation and usage requirement, as it functions as an Ethernet bridge, allowing the other units to request and be assigned IP addresses over DHCP. The ZP100 units also conveniently feature a four port Ethernet switch on the back, which allows one to network other devices. Depending on whether the ZP100 unit in question is wired or wireless, it functions in this capacity as either an Ethernet or a wireless bridge.
The system is able to automatically check for new firmware versions and install them. It’s also able to automatically refresh its list of Internet radio stations, which is great for having new stations added and updating the URLs of stations that move around. I really like systems that are able to perform self-maintenance in this way.
The whole system appears to works very well. After a few days of use, I have few complaints. The only ones that spring to mind are:
Internet radio stations must support WMA or MP3 streams to be usable by the Sonos system. RealAudio streams, for example, don’t work. By way of contrast, the MythMusic module of MythTV can do this.
Only SMB network shares are supported for accessing one’s music collection. Samba to the rescue.
Whilst one can shuffle the play order of songs, there’s no smart mode, whereby songs are picked pseudo-randomly, weighted according to the number of previous plays. Again, MythMusic has this feature and it’s great for picking songs out of a hat, but with a bias towards the music that one prefers.
All the features and functions of the remote controller are also available via the so-called desktop controller, which is a piece of software that runs under either Windows or MacOS X. This makes it very inconvenient for me to use and I would like to have seen a Web-based controller operating via the Ethernet-wired ZonePlayer.
The person who installed the system had already flashed the various units to the latest version of the firmware at his workplace. Unfortunately, this required him to register the system using his own name and e-mail address. Surprisingly, after calling Sonos, it turns out to be impossible to later rectify this situation without performing a reset of the entire system to the factory default state. On the plus side, having everything registered in my own name doesn’t actually appear to matter very much.
All in all, then, it’s an impressive system with a lot of flexibility and it beats installing PCs all over the house.