Hi, I am new to the community and just beginning to research SB and Sonos.
Basically we are looking to set up two music zones in our house. One in the master bedroom and one in the living room. Our wireless router sits at the landing at the top of our stairs. Currently we have a Roku Soundbridge hooked up in the living room. For the most part, it plays with little issues. Occasionally, it has to rebuffer and the music cuts out while it does so. Our house appears to be a WiFi nightmare. In our old house, we used an Apple Time Capsule for both backup and the wireless router function. The time capsule was a good 60 feet away from the computers downstairs (going through floors and walls). We never had any issues whatsoever. The Soundbridge worked perfectly in the old house as well. We moved here and I was having a hell of a time getting the network up and running. My fiance went out and bought a new router for us to try. She fell for some creative advertising that said it produced a stronger signal. We tried with that and it was worse than the time capsule. In fact, I moved the router downstairs and placed it 25 feet, line of sight, from my laptop. The signal was garbage from 25 feet. The Soundbridge that was also 25 feet away and line of sight couldn't play more than 5 seconds of music before it had to rebuffer. We concluded the router was garbage. I ordered the Linksys WRT54GL router from amazon. I purchased it mainly because of the option of installing different software on it and being able to tweak the signal output if necessary. Luckily, I hooked the router up, put it back at the top of the stairs, and everything worked with no other adjustments. The signal strength in the house is not perfect. It is still weak considering how close the computers and soundbridge are to the router. At least they work with little issues besides the soundbridge needing to rebuffer occasionally (as I mentioned above). So now we want to add a means of listening to pandora and sirius on both the home stereo and the bedroom stereo. The soundbridge is cool and was great when we first got it two years ago. It is obviously dated in the sense that it only plays mp3s and internet radio stations. It will be replaced by whatever we decide to buy. We are looking at the SB and the Sonos. When I read about the SB duet, I was excited as it seemed like a less expensive alternative to the Sonos. Then I read some problems people were having with it working on their wireless network. I realize some of these problems could have been with their network settings or configuration. The appeal of the Sonos system is that it creates its own network with each zone player extending the network. The drawback is that the system isn't cheap and requires a remote to be purchased separately (unless I want to use my laptop to control everything, which I don't). The SB touch looks promising. I don't know much about the antennas or its ability to operate wireless without problems. We are renting our current house so running Cat 5 cable through the walls is not an option for us. We need to get something that will operate wireless. I am not against getting a system that benefits from a little tweaking. That being said, I do not want to buy something that makes me want to pull my hair out before I ever hear a sound come out of the system. I am not a network guru that can tweak the hell out of my router either. I understand the basics and can navigate well with a little help. I am not trying to turn this into a SB vs. Sonos debate. That is the last thing I want. I realize that by being on the SB forum, I am likely to get strong support for the SB over the Sonos. I am just looking for some honest feedback and some opinions on what others have experienced. >From every critique I have read on the SB, most responders simply slam the person using the SB saying the user or the user's network is to blame for the problems with the SB. I don't doubt that in some situations the user and/or their network is to blame. I am also not naive enough to thing that the SB is the perfect product (nor is the Sonos for that matter). Thank you in advance for the help. Hopefully I have included enough information about our current setup for people to make recommendations. Thanks, Randy -- rrweather ------------------------------------------------------------------------ rrweather's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=33706 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=70113 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
