Despite being a young company, Sonos has built a following for being a premier solution for wirelessly streaming music from your PC to all of the rooms in your house. But they've always been pricey little units—until now...
The New York Times puts it best:
Using the handheld Sonos controller or the Sonos iPhone app, each room can have its own unique music, or the entire house can bellow the same track simultaneously.But the opportunity has never come cheap. To set up Sonos in just two rooms costs $1149, including one set of speakers.
But the New York Times is also what tipped us on to the fact that Sonos is releasing a lower-priced device to do the same job.
The Sonos ZonePlayer S5 is an all-in-one device that can stream music from online radio or your PC all around your house—for the much more affordable price of $399. Plus, you can still control your Sonos setup with the iPhone app.
It's not out just yet, but you can sign up for the email list at Sonos' Web site to get updates on its release date.
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Comments (2)
Finally. Hope it's not too late for them, though. You can already control iTunes remotely, using an AirPort Express and an iPhone or iPod Touch, for a fraction the cost of a Sonos base unit, satellite unit and remote controller.
There's no question that if all you want is to play one source in one place, you can find much cheaper solutions. But if you want multiple zones that can play the same or different inputs, sonos is by far the best solution.
Sonos' big value added over itunes, slingbox, or do-it-yourself systems is that it gives you painless setup, centralized control over the whole house, and perfect synchronization between zones.
The last may be the most important. If you have a bigger room, you might have two zones set up in it so that you don't have to blast the music from just one set of speakers. If the zones are out of sync, even just a little, it will sound horrible.
However, sonos have sort of been resting on their laurels, and I'm not sure I'd buy their stock, as much as I like their [current] products. They have no solution for either streaming video, multi-channel audio, or even audio at better than cd quality.