My wife and I love music. We listen to music all the time, and we like to listen to it all over the house. Our home came pre-wired for speakers when we bought it, but we never actually had speakers installed. After suffering through the pain that is the Apple Airport Express (sorry, Apple) – we finally decided that it was time for an early Christmas present, and had speakers installed throughout our place, and decided to go with Sonos stuff to power it.
I first heard of Sonos back in 2006 from none other than Joel Spolsky. His words in describing Sonos back then are pretty much the exact words that I would use to describe it 3 years later:
…laptops have lousy speakers, and I had been looking for a way to pump the music from the computer into other rooms of the house, so last January I finally got a Sonos system, which is probably the coolest piece of technology I’ve ever bought. Ever.
So what we’ve got ourselves here is 4 pairs of speakers installed in our place: Office, Master Bedroom, Living Room and Kitchen. All 4 pairs of speakers terminate at a central location, so it feels a little bit strange, but all 4 of the Sonos units I bought are all sitting right next to each other, even though each one is responsible for controlling a different set of speakers (or different ‘zone’) within the house. It doesn’t make any difference from a control perspective, since you can control everything wirelessly (is that even a word?) from either a Sonos Controller, the Sonos iPhone/iPod Touch App, or the desktop software.
So from there, you basically set up each player to be responsible for a specific “zone”. Here’s a partial screenshot of the Sonos Desktop Controller app:
You basically select whatever “zone” you want to play music in, and then choose what you want to play, and blammo – you have music. You can easily link/unlink zones in the event that you’d like a few zones to be playing the same thing.
I’d try to talk more about how cool it is, but the video on the Sonos site can probably do a better job, given that I’m recovering from a flu, and about as coherent as an illiterate monkey hopped up on too much Dayquil.
