Thoughts on sonos and apple

[admin_exported]

I just thought my experience of these systems might be of interest to someone and had an idle few minutes to post.

I have owned the sonos units(zp100 in kitchen and games room/gym ,zp80 connected to home cinema)since 2004 and have been over the moon with its ease of use and since napster and spotify the huge range of music I can access.

I feel that the only failing of the system is now the user interface which is out of date and lacking in the functionality of Napster, itunes and Spotify.

Last year I bought an iMac to put in the kitchen after getting increasingly frustrated by my one year old Dell desktop.This was followed by an ipod touch. I increasingly started using the iMac to listen to music using the aforementioned music services and their own interfaces bypassing sonos.

When Sonos anounced compatibility with airport express I decided to get one , primarily to extend my wireless network by plugging it into my zp80(after difficulty using an old router ),however using this I can now automatically play music using the itunes and spotify interface through the sonos system with ,hopefully Napster to follow soon.

I am now thinking of getting an Apple tv for the home cinema so I can use Itunes on my 50 inch screen along with the visualizations etc(great for parties).

So it seems I have been sucked into the Apple way of things and away from Sonos which is a shame as all it needs is a massive improvement in its UI,however at present the two systems are complimenting each other and making it easy for my simple mind to play music wherever I want using the interface I want.

Rambling over and bye bye

Mark

 

[kinda]

Hello,

Thanks for posting the experience. I have the Sonos and an iPod Touch I use for mostly as the interface.

From the post it sounds like prior to the Apple experiment you were using the Sonos Windows client which is a bit clunky, (although I finds iTunes similarly clunky). The iPod app is a lot better.

I don't have any experience with AirPlay but as I understand it it's just about sending the music from an Apple device to a remote amplifier on your network. It doesn't have the multi-room shared music facilities of systems like Sonos. Having experienced Sonos I can't imagine many things being simpler to set up and use, or have such good support, and it doesn't take up your own network bandwidth as it creates its own.

It has stuff like Last FM and internet radio, but I do admit that it maybe needs an update now for things like HD audio, and the Windows interfae could do with a bit of a polish. A visualiser would be a nice to have on occasion but I turned away from a media player type audio solution as having to have the TV on to play music was a pain. Fundamentally the Sonos is still a very good product.

I don't see tha Apple audio solutions as better ot cheaper than Sonos and I'd never invest heavily in Apple stuff out of principal really as the way they try to lock people in to their hardware and push their own bespoke file formats is just wrong. No FLAC support, just the pointless ALAC alternative, limited video file support on Apple TV, (which is still limited to 720P in hardware?), and so on. And the hardware always seems under-specced for the price.

 

[Anonymous]

As a heavy Apple TV and AirPort Express user for a few years now I've often looked at the Sonos route out of curiosity but have been put off by the high price barrier.

The lower-cost Apple route has served me well so far, with iTunes as my music source, and AirPort Express and Apple TV units providing multi-room audio. The Remote App for iPhone gives me an easy way to choose which rooms I want to hear the music in, and this - so far - has worked well for me.

Clearly you need to add some form of amplification in each room, either via an amp and speakers or an all-in-one hi-fi, so that does add cost to the solution.

You mention Visualisations on the Apple TV - I've not come across that before, and I'm not sure that's a feature? You can select photo albums as a 'screen saver' though.