As a kid, my family often visited friends who had a classic Wurlitzer jukebox stocked full with vinyl records. Like a moth to a flame, I was instantly in front of it queuing song after song. I stood glued there for hours, mesmerized with the music and the mechanical motion of 45s flipping onto place. With hundreds of tunes to choose, I created my first playlists by simply pushing buttons. What an amazing concept for my young mind!

Fast forward to present day. Sonos actually one-ups that old Wurlitzer. No, the Sonos doesn't have a cool gothic structure with shiny chrome and bubble tubes, but I'll give it up for easy access to millions of songs, podcasts, audio books and Internet radio playing in multiple rooms. That's something the Wurlitzer could never do.

The Sonos Digital Music System is well-known as a multi-zone system that nicely fills the place beyond stand-alone network music players and iPods. What's new is that Sonos has added the Rhapsody music service. We put the Sonos through its paces including a computer-free setup, listening to Internet streaming music only, and letting it hit our network with 5TB of disk space on Windows and Mac computers and a 2TB network attached storage (NAS) device. We listened to lossless, MP3, Audible, various podcasts, Ogg and more. After a week with this system, we covet it and don't want to send it back. Sonos has really nailed the integration and experience. We give Sonos our top marks.

Read more for details. 

The Sonos Digital Music System is designed to let you play audio from digital music sources. Like other network digital audio players, it can play a variety of audio files from your networked computers and network attached storage (NAS), as well as music services. The key difference between Sonos and many competing products is the networked nature of the players. Each Sonos ZonePlayer on your network knows the status of every other Sonos ZonePlayer. For anyone with a goal of creating a whole-house music system, this distinction is significant.

Sonos Components

Sonos offers key components to design and complete a music system.

ZonePlayers

The heart of the system is the ZonePlayer. Sonos offers two types of ZonePlayers:

• ZP100: A ZonePlayer with a 50-watt-per-channel amplifier that can power up to four 8 ohm speakers and can also connect directly to another device like a receiver or powered speaker system. In addition, the ZP100 includes a line-level sub-woofer output jack. The ZP100 does not include line-level digital audio outputs.
  MSRP: $499.00
  
• Sonos ZP100 and ZP80 ZonePlayers

  
  ZP80: A ZonePlayer designed to be connected to a receiver or powered speaker system. In addition to wireless and Ethernet network connectivity plus analog in and out jacks, the ZP80 includes two digital audio output jacks (optical and coax). The Sonos ZP80 will work with any home audio system or powered speakers that offer a line-level input or digital audio input.
  MSRP: $349.00
  

Sonos Wireless Controller and Charging Cradle

The Sonos system can be controlled two ways: 1) the Sonos Wireless Controller (CR100), and 2) a Windows or Mac computer using the Sonos Desktop Controller. The Sonos Wireless Controller is favored by most Sonos users. Either method allows easy control of all Sonos ZonePlayers on the network. While the CR100 comes with a power cable that will power it directly, it does not come with an easy-in/easy-out charging cradle. At $399.00, we think Sonos ought to include the Sonos Charging Cradle (CC100). If you want it, you'll have to pony up an additional $49.99.

Sonos Desktop Controller

Sonos Speakers

While Sonos ZP100 will work with any two 4-ohm speakers or four 8-ohm speakers, Sonos sells the Sonos Loudspeaker (SP100), which includes two 8-ohm speakers. While there are certainly more capable speakers available, these small bookshelf speakers sound pretty good for the $179/pair price tag. They do lack a bit on the lower end and felt somewhat empty in the middle, but for $179 we were duly impressed by them.

Sonos Setup

Our evaluation system included:

• One Sonos ZP100 ZonePlayer – MSRP $499.00
• One Sonos ZP80 ZonePlayer – MSRP $349.00
• A pair of Sonos SP100s Speakers – MSRP $179.00
• Two Sonos CR100s Wireless Controllers – MSRP $399.00 each
• One Sonos CC100 Charging Cradle – MSRP $49.00

Our Sonos test was primarily set up in two rooms. A theater room with an existing audio system and a living room that had no audio at all. Additionally, we moved the system from the living room around the house to assure that it would work wirelessly from anywhere. In the drawing below we show the living room setup, but imagine the location and name of that room being anywhere in the house. Also, while our network included more than a NAS device, due to space constraints, the drawing below only shows the NAS. Any networked computer could exist in place of or in addition to the NAS.

Sonos Evaluation Setup

With newly added Rhapsody support, Sonos now touts the ability to use their system without a computer. We decided to take them at their word and set it up using just the CR100 controller. The process of setting up of the Sonos system was one of the more pleasurable consumer electronics experiences in recent memory. The steps were as follows:

1. Plug the ZP80 into AC power.
2. Connect the ZP80 directly to our Ethernet network (which has broadband access).
3. Connect the ZP80 to a home theater receiver using the line-level digital optical output. This allows playback of Sonos audio through the home theater audio setup.
4. Connect the ZP80 to a home theater receiver record-out-jacks to the Sonos line in-jacks. This let us play any audio coming from the home theater receiver through the Sonos music system.
5. Plug the ZP100 into AC power in a second room. We chose not to connect the ZP100 to our Ethernet network and instead used the built-in automatic Sonos wireless mesh network.
6. Connect the pair of SP100 speakers to the ZP100.
7. Plug a CR100 Wireless Controller into electrical power. The setup can continue while charging.
8. Follow on-screen prompts to add and name each of the ZonePlayers.
9. System registration and immediate access to the 30-day Rhapsody music trial, plus more than 100 pre-defined Internet radio stations.
10. Since we had both a NAS and a computer with MP3 files ready to go on our network, we told the Sonos controller to go find music. And it did, first try.

To play your music files, the Sonos system uses your computer network to play music stored on shared network disks from computers, servers or network attached storage devices. Sonos needs access to Windows Network Shares and can do so using most computers including Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix. Shares that are password protected with a share password, workgroup user/password and domain passwords can all be accessed.

Audio Formats

Sonos Supports Audible Playback

File Strategies

Sonos relies on the audio files you have on your network shares. Therefore, Sonos' search, display and playback is only as good as your content. Garbage in, garbage out. For example, if your MP3 music files don't have accurate artist, album art, track name, album name and genre in iTunes, they won't have it in Sonos either. Generally speaking, CDs ripped by iTunes or Windows Media Player should perform well in Sonos. I've always been a stickler about accurately ripping my music and tagging it consistently, and the 8,000+ music files that Sonos found were exactly as I expected.

Sonos Use

Sonos ZP100 Back

1. Zones equal ZonePlayers. When you are selecting audio to play, you are doing so for a specific ZonePlayer or groups of ZonePlayers.
2. Audio played on a ZonePlayer can come from several sources:
• Rhapsody music service.
• Internet radio.
• Computers on your network. These computers can be Windows, Mac, Unix or Linux. The only requirement is to share the folders on those computers containing music using Windows compatible file sharing. Sonos walks you through that if you don't already have it setup.
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Our primary music repository on the test network was a 2-terabyte Infrant ReadyNAS NV. Infrant has a default share called media. Sonos immediately found this share.
• Line-in jack. You can listen to the audio from a line-in jack connected to any ZonePlayer on any ZonePlayer in the network.

Music Library

The Music Library is audio existing on other computers or NAS devices on your network. Sonos does not store any audio on the ZonePlayers, instead relying on other local devices to store and make that audio available for the Sonos ZonePlayers. After finding and indexing the audio on your local network, all your content is available for playback on the Sonos.

Rhapsody Music Service

Full-disclosure. I've never been a fan of Real's (the creator of Rhapsody) products. In fact, I haven't used any of Real's products in years, because my last experience with their in-your-face software was laden with update interruptions and unwanted surprise software installations that really didn't want to be uninstalled. With that disclosure out of the way, I'm very happy to say that my Sonos experience using the Rhapsody service made me a Rhapsody fan. Their content variety is excellent, the 128kbit streaming audio quality sounds pretty good, and because it works directly with Sonos, there's no software to install. If you have a Sonos, you're likely going to want to spend the $9.99 per month to get unlimited access to the fast array of content available from Rhapsody including most any music genre, and spoken audio content with an amazing selection of comedians. My only gripe with Rhapsody on Sonos is that you can't find music by Artist. You first have to narrow it down by Genre. Even if it's a bandwidth issue, they could break up artists alphabetically. The ability to find content by Artist would be a great improvement.

Internet Radio

More than 300 free streaming Internet Radio stations are pre-defined in Sonos. In addition to those, you can add just about any Internet Radio station that you could add to iTunes including the thousands of free Shoutcast stations. You can even stream your XM radio and Sky.fm accounts over the Internet. Unfortunately, Sonos doesn't yet support one of my new favorite services, Pandora.

Podcast Support

Sonos handles podcasts reasonably well. We limited our podcast test to those downloaded by iTunes and indexed by the Sonos system. However, podcasts downloaded using other podcast aggregators would work equally well. The genre on iTunes podcasts is 'Podcast' so that's the easiest way to find them, although artist, album and track also work. We did find a few problems with podcasts that we'd like to see Sonos address:

• Longer podcasts (over 30 minutes) had tracking problems associated with fast forwarding which caused inconsistent playback. We reported this to Sonos and they acknowledged it was a bug. Based on our conversations with Sonos, we expect a fix will be rolled into a future software update.
• Enhanced iTunes podcasts using the AAC (.m4a or .m4b) format with bookmarks were not supported by Sonos. It's too bad as Sonos does a nice job of supporting chapters in Audible audio books. Hopefully, they'll add enhanced podcast bookmark support in future versions.
• Sonos treats podcasts no differently than music files, so your place in the podcast is not remembered. It would be useful for Sonos to treat podcasts like Audible audio books and remember where you paused.

Sonos ZP80 Back

One of my favorite features is Sono's ability to give you access not only to line-in jacks on the ZonePlayer connected to the source, but also the ability stream that audio anywhere on your Sonos network. You can label each line-in source from each ZonePlayer separately so that you can listen to any source anywhere. Obvious examples of cool line-in sources include XM and Sirius satellite, terrestrial radio plus any other audio source you can think of.

Zones

Each ZonePlayer represents a zone, which depending on your house layout, is usually a single room such as a bedroom, or a patio, etc. Each zone can play specific content – including the line-in from any other ZonePlayer. For example, if you had five ZonePlayers, you could play the same content in all five zones or totally different content in each zone – you can even group zones however you like. A very nice feature that is perfectly implemented.

A key factor in multiple zone playback is syncing. Since all of the content is being streamed, it's easy to imagine how the same audio played in the various zones could get out of sync. With Sonos, however, this simply does not happen. Regardless of whether we played local media files, Internet radio, Rhapsody or line-in content; Sonos ZonePlayers were never out of sync. Excellent for house-wide music.

Maintaining the settings associated with the setup of your Sonos system, including Internet radio stations, Rhapsody services and indexed drives, is essential. Since everything is stored in nonvolatile flash, even if you lose power the Sonos picks right up where you left off. Additionally, Sonos automatically replicates this data across all your ZonePlayers making information difficult to lose, even in the unlikely event that a ZonePlayer fails.

Controller

Sonos Controller Feels Right

The scroll wheel interface, with a button in the center of the wheel and the return button just above it, allows you to easily move through your library, making selections along the way. Because it has more buttons available, it's a bit different than the iPod, but it has a familiar feel that anyone can get accustomed to quickly.

The Sonos controller has two modes: Zones and Music.

Zones allows you to choose which zone(s) you want to control, as well as combine or separate zones.

The Music mode has the most options. In Music you can:

• Select audio from your local library.
• Select audio from the Rhapsody Music Guide.
• Select Sonos playlists (which can be a combination of Rhapsody and local audio).
• Select Internet Radio. To add Internet Radio stations you must use the computer-based Sonos Desktop Controller.
• Select audio from any of your Line-in sources.
• Manage your clock and alarms and date/time settings. The default date/time setup is to sync the Sonos with the Internet.
• Manage Your Library
• Update the Music index – for example to gain access to recently ripped music
• Schedule automated Music index updates (on/off/time of day)
• Add new Music sources from your local network
• Change Compilation group settings
• Change Contributing Artists View setting
• Add ZonePlayers
• Change ZonePlayer Settings including equalization (bass, treble, balance, loudness); ZonePlayer name (predefined or custom); toggle ZonePlayer lights; ZonePlayer line out volume (fixed or variable)
• Change Controller settings including sleep timers, screen and button brightness, click sound (like an iPod), how certain buttons work, motion sensor on/off, and language
• Online software updates of your ZonePlayers.
• Use several advanced settings to define sorting, Line-in encoding (lossy or lossless), Wireless channels, auto software updates and auto Internet radio updates.
• Use the controller's 9 hard buttons (vol up, vol down, mute, zones, music, return, prev/rewind, play/pause, next/fast forward), and three smart buttons that are defined by values on the LCD screen, plus a scroll wheel with an OK center button.

Queue Management

Queue management on the Sonos is elegantly implemented. You can add a local network or Rhapsody music service song, album, artist, genre, or playlist to play now, play next (insert in an existing queue) or add to the end of the queue. At any time, you can view your queue, move tracks in a queue, clear a queue or save a queue to a Sonos playlist. The interface is simple enough that during a party, for example, your guests can find music and add or insert it in a queue – if you're willing to give up the controller.

Playback

As you would expect, you can play your current queue using various playback modes:

• Normal plays the queue in order.
• Shuffle plays the queue one time in a random order.
• Repeat plays the queue in order and repeats when reaching the end.
• Shuffle-repeat continues to play the queue in a random order repeatedly.
  

Sonos has a feature that just arrived on the iPod and iTunes – gapless playback – so you can enjoy Pink Floyd's Darkside of the Moon, the latest rave DJ mix or Vivaldi the way it was intended, without gaps between the tracks.

Access to your music library is an aggregated view across all of the disks your Sonos indexes. The interface to access your music library feels a lot like accessing your music on an iPod. You can get access to local audio by:

• Artist: An alphabetical list of artists from your local sources.
• Album: An alphabetical list of albums from your local sources.
• Genre: An alphabetical list of genres from your local sources.
• Composer: An alphabetical list of composers from your local sources.
• Track: An alphabetical list of tracks or songs from your local sources.
• Imported Playlists: An alphabetical lists of playlists imported from any network drives your Sonos indexes. Note: Sonos is only aware of Playlists stored on drives where it has access. Therefore, if you use iTunes, you must also share your computer's iTunes Music folder (even if the actual iTunes music files are on another drive. such as a NAS) or the iTunes Playlists will be unavailable on Sonos.
• Folders: A complete list of every volume (computer, NAS, etc.) that Sonos is aware of. You can drill down through each volume and folder and pick songs or folders to play.

Sound Quality

Sound quality is dependent several factors including:

• Source: MP3 encoding settings vs. lossless, streaming audio, line-in and line-in settings
• Speakers: With the ZP100, you can use the Sonos speakers, but you can also use most any reasonably efficient speakers with them, including sub-woofers.
• Line Output: With the ZP80, you can run the line-out analog or optical. Of course it will sound substantially different depending on what you connect it to.

Overall, we think the Sonos system sounds excellent from both the ZP100 or ZP80.

If your goal is high-fidelity with iPod convenience, the ZP80 digitally connected to your favorite hi-fi system is the best way to get the high-end sound you want. However, the ZP100 is no slouch and not only did a nice job with the ZP100 speakers, but also sounded substantially better with a speaker upgrade. We tried it out with the very efficient Boston Acoustics CR77 bookshelf speakers with a 6.5” woofer and 1” tweeter. At about twice the price of the SP100s, they should sound better and they do. With only 50 watts-per-channel, it's our assumption that efficient speakers that don't crave lots of power will work better with the ZP100.

While not surprising, we were very pleased with sound coming from the ZP80 when connected digitally to our our hi-fi audio system. By comparison, it's quite a bit richer and more dynamic sound than the clean and more-than-acceptable sound coming from the basic setup of an Apple Airport Express digitally connected to the same system.

Pros

• Effortless user interface
• Excellent sound quality
• Easy setup
• Excellent iTunes integration
• Excellent file/folder-based music library integration
• Easy expandability mixing wired and wireless zones
• Easy ad-hoc setup for outdoor parties, etc.
• Strong Rhapsody integration
• Strong Audible integration
• Gapless playback
  
• Strong support for streaming Internet audio
• Easy setup for multiple locations of media files

Cons

• Needs podcast support improvement. Problems include: 1) Sonos doesn't remember where you paused like it does with Audible; 2) Sonos gets lost when fast forwarding through a long podcast (this is a bug that Sonos acknowledged and will likely fix soon); 3) Sonos doesn't support enhanced AAC podcasts with bookmarks.
• In Rhapsody, you must select a Genre before you can search for an Artist.
• No Pandora support
• No mixed ZP80/ZP100 bundle

Overall Experience

The outstanding interface, excellent sound quality, easy setup and expansion, and effortless operation demand we highly recommend the Sonos system. While you can get into a basic ZP80 system controlled with the computer-based Sonos Desktop Controller for $349.00, we believe most buyers will also want a wireless controller and a couple of zones. A setup with a ZP80, ZP100, Wireless Controller, Charging Cradle and SP100 speakers will run just shy of $1,500. We would like to see a bundle with a ZP80, ZP100, a controller and cradle as we think this is likely a common configuration for many enthusiasts.

Compared with other multi-zone music systems, the Sonos is priced competitively with features, ease of use and an implementation that exceeds most of what's on the market today. But, the slam dunk for me – the Sonos gave me that same sense of joy and wonder I had as a kid standing in front of the Wurlitzer jukebox. It totally lives on in the Sonos.

Sonos.com  

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