NeilF wrote: 
> What did you find lacking on the Sonos?

Well, it has been a while since I used the Sonos system but here is what
I remember from using it for a while:

* There is no visible indication of what the ZP90 is doing. The white
LED on the front of the device is always on (or always off; this
configurable) but it does not give an indication of the player‘s status.
Is the player streaming or not; impossible to know just by looking at
the player. It is only by picking up a remote or running the desktop app
that the status is revealed. 

* Lack of an infrared remote. I find an IR remote very useful; for
example to quickly mute the device when the phone rings. I also use a
Harmony remote in my system and I often use that to skip songs to. The
Harmony also toggles power on the Squeezebox when required. This is not
possible with Sonos.

* A list of new music is not available. This is a feature I very often
use on my Squeezeboxes. I find such a list very useful to quickly get t
an album that I recently ripped.

* Albums are not listed by date. There is no way to influence how Sonos
organizes albums when browsing for albums by artist.

* The iPod / iPhone remote often had troubles finding the ZP90 player.
Had to restart it a couple of times before it finds the player. This
might be related to my old gen 2 iPod Touch but I don’t have such issues
with iPeng.

* The iPod Touch app uses too small cover art and font to list albums.
This makes it quite difficult to read the display.

* Random song mix is possible on Sonos but it is rather implemented as a
bad workaround. One needs to add his entire music library to the current
playlist and then activate random play. 

* Very poor WAV file support. An apparent issue is that Sonos is not
able to list Various Artist when using WAV files.

* 65k song limit. This is even influenced in a negative way if playlists
are used. This limitation exists because of their “server less” system.
In fact, one of the zone players takes on the role of a server. Given
the fact that zone players have limited cpu power, limits start to
arise… such as the 65k song limit. True, I don’t have 65k songs in my
library today but these are typical limits I want to avoid.

*…

Many of the above items have been listed on the Sonos forums. Many of
these have been reported since many years, yet Sonos did nothing about
it to this day. In that sense, Sonos is even worse than Logitech for
listening to their customers. 

In short, Sonos is no match for the user friendliness a Squeezebox
system gives you. I have been spoiled by Squeezebox since 2005 and I
just can’t live without the many great features it has. Some of the
listed items may seem as minor, but believe me; you’ll get tired of the
many shortcomings of a Sonos system after using them for a while.  Once
you are used to Squeezebox system, there are very little systems out
there that can compete with the user experience a Squeezebox brings to
the table.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pascal Hibon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7969
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=91090

_______________________________________________
discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Reply via email to