Sonos wireless sound systems might not be cheap, but their easily switchable, multi-zone design makes having wireless music throughout your house simple. In 2012, the company added a burly sub to its lineup of products, and from the looks of this FCC filing, a sound bar, called the Playbar, might drop soon. More »
When you decide to pick up a Sonos speaker, you decide to jump into an ever-expanding ecosystem of both hardware and software, with a brand that’s dead set on pushing an immersive experience out to the customer. With the newest member of the family, the Sonos SUB, you’ve now got an earth-rumbling bass component in addition to a couple of sets of high-quality speakers and several center points – dock, bridge (hub), amplifier, whatever you want. The big question you should be asking yourself here is not just if you want to work with the magic that is the SonosNet wireless mesh network, but if you feel its necessary to pick up more than one of the Sonos family components.
With the Sonos SUB you’ve got a one-button-connected bass component for your Sonos system. You will not want to buy just the SUB and not at least one of the two speakers that Sonos has to offer, those being the PLAY:5 or the PLAY:3. With either of the PLAY speakers – if you buy one at the time this post is being published – Sonos has a special “Gift Pack” that essentially means you’ll get a free Sonos Bridge with the purchase of either speaker. So you’ve got the Bridge, either a 3 or a 5 speaker (or two) and the SUB – this is the basic setup you’ll want, not just the SUB.
This is because the Sonos family of devices works in its own net, and does not connect the same way a standard speaker does. On the other hand, if you do pick up the Sonos CONNECT or CONNECT:AMP, you’ll be able to connect a standard RCA line-in bit of audio to your SONOS network where it can be wirelessly output to the SUB and wired to several of your standard speakers with combined spring binding post / banana jack connectors all at once. And if you don’t know what that means, I wish you good luck and suggest you get a standard speaker setup.
On the other hand again, if you want to work with Sonos from top to bottom, you can connect whatever you want to a CONNECT and blast all your audio from all your sources. If you just want music, you wont have to mess with all of this stuff, you’ll only need one Sonos speaker – and the AMP, since that’s what we’re reviewing, of course. To connect your devices together, you either need to hook one (any one) of your Sonos speakers or SUB to the internet with an ethernet cord.
If you don’t want to connect one of your speakers with an ethernet cord – if your router is in a room that you don’t want speakers in, for example – then you should indeed get the BRIDGE. With the BRIDGE you can connect to the web, then the BRIDGE will be your access point for all the rest of the devices. Then you’ve only to access and wirelessly control the music you want to listen to from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android phone, Android tablet, Mac, or Windows-toting PC.
The software experience with Sonos is being updated rather rapidly – just today we found an update for the iOS apps that allow us to play music directly from the device, this effectively taking the place of what Apple notes is their unique wireless capability in AirPlay. Android has an app that’s essentially the same as the iOS experience, while the Mac and PC versions of the software offer, again, basically the same abilities with slightly different layouts.
Above: Android, Below: iOS (iPhone 5)
The larger the screen you have, the easier it is to navigate the Sonos user interface – while when you’re working with a display as small as the iPhone 5, you might be tripped up by the slightly less-than-intuitive arrangement of the buttons and access to your tunes. Once you’ve set up your own playlist or have decided upon a single source for your music though, you won’t have to worry about it.
At the moment you can use a variety of music sources including Pandora, Spotify, tunein, Amazon Cloud Player, Songza, Rhapsody, mog, SiriusXM, iHeartRadio, Slacker Radio, Wolfgang’s Vault, DAR.fm, AUPEO, rdio, murfie, last.fm, and stitcher. Sonos is currenly working with the developers of 7digital and Hearts of Space to get them onboard with this wireless experience as well.
Perhaps the most useful element in all of this SonosNet wireless control environment is the power to group speakers together individually. You can set up a couple of PLAY:3 units in your living room with a SUB under the couch while you’ve got two PLAY:5 speakers in the kitchen and a set of two 5′s, two 3′s, a SUB, and a CONNECT:AMP in your basement to play some heavy-hitting theater beats, each of the rooms with their own audio, all of them in the same network. The real power of this system is for the super-vested in Sonos to create their own massive network, really.
There’s not much to be said for the sound quality of the SUB that’s not already spoken by Sonos themselves: “soul-shaking” is what they call it. Indeed it is difficult to even set this device up for sound if you live in an apartment for fear that you might not only disturb the residents above and below you, but that you might wake up your neighbors across the hall as well, not to mention the whole complex across the street.
But once you do have the system set up and ready to rock, you can turn the whole thing down to human levels. This system is made to be sitting either right out in the open next to your television set or in the center of your room or under your couch or bed. If you do place it under your seats, prepare to get you butt rumbled. The sound here is as loud and as precise as any system we’ve yet tested.
The SUB doesn’t break up the family as other massive stand-along subwoofers might. Instead it’s able to be mixed right in with the natural array of sounds coming from the rest of your Sonos speakers – and with your Sonos apps you’re able to push them all up and down individually as needed, of course.
The Sonos SUB is a massively expensive subwoofer made to be part of the full wireless speaker family for an equally giant price: $699 right out of the box. You do get free shipping and unlimited support from Sonos, and we’re to understand that there’s a slightly less glossy version of this machine coming soon that’ll cost just a bit less than this first release. If you’re willing to pay $699 for a component in your hi-fi speaker arrangement, you certainly wont be disappointed in the SUB.
Have a peek at the column/review Small Sonos: Is multi-room music overkill in a tiny apartment? by Chris Davies for additional insight with the Sonos PLAY:3 and the overall Sonos experience.
Sonos SUB Review is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Sonos has updated its controller apps for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, adding the ability to stream music stored on the iOS devices directly to the multi-room wireless audio system. The new update, which popped up in the App Store today, treats local storage on the phone or tablet just as it does your traditional music collection and online sources such as Spotify, taking on Apple’s own AirPlay system in the process.
Tracks stored on the iPhone or iPad can be added to a Spotify playlist, along with content from multiple other sources. However, there’s no way to pipe audio from other iOS apps through a Sonos system; that means you can listen to music on YouTube through Sonos from your phone, nor have game soundtracks play back via your bigger speakers.
Sonos is yet to add the functionality to its Android client, either, though that was given a mild update today with no new features. The company’s Mac and PC clients also lack the streaming support, though we’d be surprised if all of these were left out in the cold for long. It’s worth noting that the iPhone app is still to be updated for the iPhone 5′s 4-inch display.
Apple’s AirPlay system has similar features to Sonos, and works with third-party speakers such as Libratone’s Zipp. What’s been missing so far has been a way to pipe AirPlay into a Sonos system; so far, the advice has been to plug an AirPort Express into the aux-in input found on a PLAY:5 speaker.
You’ll need iOS 6 in order to use the new Sonos functionality, and of course a Sonos system and an iOS device. You can find the updated iPhone/iPod touch app here [iTunes link] and the updated iPad app here.
Sonos adds AirPlay-style streaming from iPhone and iPad music is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Sonos has been steadily reducing our dependency on the computer as the cornerstone of its multi-room audio system, but there’s been one link left to cut: local music. Outside of an AirPlay workaround, a PC of some sort has always had to stay awake to stream a personal collection. If you’re an iOS user, it’s now possible to go truly PC-free. A 3.8.3 update for Sonos’ apps plays music stored on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch directly through the system, with no hoop-jumping required. Local content is put on equal footing with pure internet sources, too — the software can mix local tracks with those from Amazon Cloud Player, Spotify and other internet services as part of the same playlist. There’s no official word of direct device streaming for Android, although we wouldn’t be surprised to see it follow before too long.
We gave the update a quick spin of our own, and it works largely as you’d hope. There’s a logical hierarchy for browsing music by categories; songs, albums and podcasts play almost as soon as you’ve added them to the queue, even if the Sonos app is in the background. We heard slight hitches when playing tracks meant to play seamlessly — this may not be a dream Dark Side of the Moon setup — but grouped speakers stay just as nicely in sync as they have in the past. The Sonos upgrade is more than good enough to save a walk across the house for a favorite tune, and that’s really all we need.
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio/Video, Tablets, HD
Source: App Store (iPad), (iPhone)
Couldn’t find the deal you wanted for Cyber Monday? Try your hand at Giveaway Tuesday, as Sonos wants to help you ring in the New Year with your very own Wireless HiFi speaker system! If you don’t know what Sonos is all about, head to the company’s site, check out our in-depth review and then proceed to the comments section below to enter. It’s well worth the small amount of time it takes to do so.
Continue reading Engadget Giveaway: win a Sonos Play:3 and Sonos Bridge bundle!
Filed under: Announcements, HD, Mobile
The Sony Walkman was the first to make music really portable, but you can say that it was Apple’s iPod that helped spread the digital music oats far and wide across the globe. The mantra, “Your Music, Everywhere” would be very apt to describe the Amazon Cloud Player, as it allows customers the ability to be able to enjoy their music across the broadest selection of devices, ranging from the Kindle Fire to a slew of Android-powered devices, in addition to offerings from Apple such as the iPhone, iPod touch and Mac – without discounting perennial favorites like the PC, with the list finally being expanded to include the family of Sonos wireless Hi-Fi systems.
With the introduction of Amazon Cloud Player, customers of said service are now able to listen to their music library throughout their home – sans wires, of course. The Amazon Cloud Player will allow customers to be able to securely store music in the cloud, playing it back at a later period on any of the previously mentioned devices, over Sonos.
Steve Boom, vice president of Digital Music for Amazon, said, “Our goal is to enable customers to enjoy all their music, wherever they are, and on any device. Launching on Sonos today is an important part of that strategy, as our customers have been asking us to add Sonos to the list of compatible Cloud Player devices ever since we first launched Cloud Player. We will continue to add support for more devices and platforms later this year.”
Right now, there are millions of customers who make use of Amazon Cloud Player already to download, manage and stream their music in the cloud as well as the mentioned devices. Thanks to its availability on Sonos, Amazon Cloud Player will be able to march onwards by offering a broad selection of cloud playback solutions.
For the uninitiated, the Amazon Cloud Player is a service which allows subscribers to securely store their personal music in the cloud, where they can enjoy a playback of it later on across a wide range of devices. It is also automatically integrated into Kindle Fire, so whenever you turn on your Kindle Fire, you can enjoy the full gamut of Cloud Player benefits right out of the box. All Amazon MP3 purchases as well as up to 250 imported songs can be stashed away for free.
[ Amazon Cloud Player arrives on Sonos Wireless Hi-Fi System copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
Good news to all audiophiles out there. Amazon has just announced that its Amazon Cloud Player is now available on any Sonos Wireless HiFi System. So if you’ve got a pretty neat collection of songs from your favorite artists on Amazon’s Cloud, then you can now play that funky music on any Sonos Wireless HiFi System. Amazon Cloud Player for Sonos allows users to play, search, and control your music using the Sonos app for iOS and Android.
To begin, you’ll need to register your Sonos system first to begin using Cloud Player and install the Sonos controller on your device. But if you haven’t tried any of Sonos’s awesome speakers, you can always do your shopping via Amazon. “Our goal is to enable customers to enjoy all their music, wherever they are, and on any device. Launching on Sonos today is an important part of that strategy, as our customers have been asking us to add Sonos to the list of compatible Cloud Player devices ever since we first launched Cloud Player,” said Steve Boom, vice president of Digital Music for Amazon.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Amazon tightens security after hacking scandal, Amazon launches Amazon Game Studios, releases first title called “Living Classics” on Facebook,
Along with letting us know it had pleasantly updated its Cloud Player with 256 Kbps matched files, Amazon also briefly mentioned that Sonos compatibility would be coming sometime “soon.” Well, it turns out you won’t have to wait much longer to blast those jams on your HiFi wireless speakers, as the online retailer’s announced its Cloud Player can now be used with any Sonos system. Naturally, the experience will be enhanced by using one of Amazon’s apps, including those on iOS and, of course, its own Kindle Fire — though you’re not limited to these, as there are plenty more ways to stream content. Sound good? You can give it a try yourself now, or check out the meaty presser after the break if you’re interested in perusing over the official notes.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Wireless, Software
Amazon Cloud Player now lets you play content on your Sonos system, helps get the party started originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Aug 2012 12:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sonos can now stream music directly from your Amazon Cloud Player account, giving the wireless mesh whole-house audio system another source option for digital tracks. Cloud Player supports uploads of a user’s existing music, as well as keeping in a copy of all MP3s bought from Amazon itself, removing the requirement to download them and store them on a local NAS or computer on your home network.
That means those users who want music not provided by Spotify, Pandora or other on-demand services already supported by Sonos can now still be accessed without needing to have some form of local storage powered on. If you’ve been frustrated by, say, Spotify’s shortage of classical or obscure disco music, then this could make a neat difference to your energy bill.
Up to 250 imported songs can be uploaded with a free account, with more space if you don’t mind paying. The Cloud Player system also supports Android and iOS devices, including Amazon’s own Kindle Fire.
You’ll need to register your Sonos system with Amazon in order to access Cloud Player content; you can do that here. The new source should show up as an “Amazon Cloud Player” option in the Music part of the Sonos controller app.
Sonos gets Amazon Cloud Player streaming is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
This week you’ll find that your Sonos player is able to hook up with none other than Songza, a system which not only allows you to make fabulous playlists, but to see playlists made by professional musicians as well. Sonos is already a system with many musical sources working with it for a fabulously harmonious system of speakers and mobile connections galore – now with Songza, you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy the sound in a whole new way.
This system is available for users in both Canada and the United States for starters, and hooking up with it is perfectly simple. All you’ve got do to is head to Songza online to sign up, then add it to your Sonos UI. Inside Sonos you only need to navigate to More Music on your Controller and poof! There Songza will be. This system is 100% free and has no audio advertisements whatsoever.
This release has several big-name music artists joining in on the party including Counting Crows, Tori Amos, Slash, and Montgomery Gentry. Each of these artists have their own playlists that you can access instantly. Sonza also allows you to make your own playlists and have them ready to go based on different times during the day as well – it’s a rather versatile system.
Dive in to our Sonos portal to see everything from hardware and software updates to reviews of products galore. You’ll also want to head to the timeline below to catch up on the newest updates to the Sonos line, and stick around as the connections continue!
Sonos updates with Songza for pro-made playlists is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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