Should I give my excellent Sonos for Airport Express ?

[professorhat]

My point was that iTunes Match is more of a roaming service and offers little to the home user, over existing equipment (presumably at least one computer and some sort of music playback system. A NAS is the ideal solution, being accessible over the internet as well as home network.

Indeed - and I think everyone agreed with that (although actually making your NAS accessible over the internet is not something a technophobe could manage I don't think - I know the likes of Synology have tried to make it simpler, but it's certainly nowhere near the likes of "point and click" yet, hence why the iTunes Match service has a place).

However, it was worth making clear that iTunes Match was never designed as a replacement (or even as a backup) for your home music collection as it seemed there was some confusion that this was what it might be for, given the comments about losing your collection if you cancelled your membership.

 

[Overdose]

This is true, but there might be some misunderstanding and temptation for some, to rely on the cloud as some sort of secure storage.

A good idea maybe, but not for me. I'm waiting for the Kindle Fire and Amazon cloud support to come over here, although I've yet to get the 'Fire' out of the box for a trial.

 

[bay24]

I think I may be the only person who has gone from airport to sonos and back to airport! I do think that sonos is great but to be honest I didn't find it much more reliable than the airport. My main reason for changing back was that the airport wasn't being used and I needed some cash and managed to get the same price second hand for my zp90 as I paid for it new (due to a great richer sounds deal). I mainly used the sonos for spotify and Internet radio so AirPlay will send this from my phone to the airport just as easily and actually it means that spotify functionality is actually better via the iPhone app than the sonos one.
I think I may well go for iTunes match as Well as I have quite a lot of low bit rate music ( from the days when I had a very small HDD in my computer!) which would benefit from the 256 AAC treatment so the £20 sounds like a good deal to me.
Obviously if you are going the NAS route then sonos is the better option though, just thought I would add my experience!