Hi Scott,
If you look up "Sonos" in the archives you should find quite a few discussions about it as it has come up several times this year. I have owned Sonos Players for about 3 years now and I can only recommend Sonos, it is absolutely the best and most flexible multi-room audio system in it's price range. I guess "expensive" is always a relative term. The Big Jambox which I am sure is not a bad speaker is also $299 just like the Play:3. Of course the Jambox is only Bluetooth and while it has a speakerphone I would hazard a guess that the Play:3 will sound better. I only own a Play:5 which is I think $399 and on top of that I have the Connect:Amp in my bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, all of them hooked up to in-wall or in-ceiling speakers. I also have 3 Connects, 1 hooked up to my Sony surround sound receiver in the living room, 1 is hooked into my high-end Sonic Frontiers tube system downstairs and 1 is hooked up to a pair of simple powered computer speakers in my office at home. I use the Play:5 mostly downstairs in my woodworking shop or sometimes on the deck in the summer since all I have to do is plug it in to a power outlet and after a minute or so it will show up again in the controller and I can send music to it. Bot the PC Desktop Controller as well as the iPhone app is fully accessible and I understand that the Mac controller is also accessible. There are a few unlabeled buttons in the app, mainly "Previous", "Play/Pause" and "Next", but it's not difficult to figure them out since they are above the home key and volume slider just where you find them in the native music app and appear in the order I listed them from left to right. The beauty of the Sonos system is not only that you can play anything from your iTunes library on your computer, but also any internet radio station you may find in apps like Tune-In Radio or Ootunes and you have access to pretty much all the popular music services like Spotify, Rdio, Slacker, Sirius, Rhapsody, Pandora, Last FM, Songza, Stitcher Radio etc. Of course you do need active subscriptions for those services that require a subscription like Sirius, Spotify, Rdio etc. The nice thing is that via the Sonos app or the Desktop Controller these services are accessible, at least those that I tried are whereas I heard that the Spotify and Sirius apps, for example, are not all that accessible. You can also hook up any analogue source like a CD Player, FM Radio etc. to any zone player you have and play this in any of the zones. You can play different things on each zone player you have or you can group them together in any configuration you like including Party Mode where the same thing plays on all the players you have throughout the house. And of course you can start with as little as a Play:3 and a ZoneBridge which will be $400 and then add any additional players of any type later to expand the system to other rooms or parts of your house. If you connect an Airport Express to one of your ZonePlayers in a certain way you can also Airplay enable the entire system, I have it set up so that as soon as I Airplay to my Sonos system whatever was playing in my bedroom and any other players that are currently grouped to that player and whatever is playing on my iPhone will take over automatically, I don't even have to open the Sonos app and set anything. Also since the last Sonos app update, you can change the volume on your Sonos system simply by using the iPhones volume buttons as long as you are in the Sonos app. I could probably continue and list more features and benefits, but I think you get the drift. I know Neil Barnfather also has a bunch of Sonos players, Annie in Denmark has at least one and so does Oyvind in Norway and there are a few others on the list. There is also a new wireless subwover available which works with all Players except the Connect:Amp since that particular player is designed specifically to hook into an existing stereo system and often one would have a subwover as part of the surround system and if not it's easy to add one. It is my hope that the next addition to the system will be a high-quality headset which connects to the Sonos system or at least a small, maybe iPhone sized receiver/headphone amplifier which would get the signal and one could plug in the headset of ones choice. There is, by the way, a 30-Pin iPhone dock from Sonos which becomes part of your system if you want to use it instead of setting up an Airport Express with your system. You can, of course, also just use a male RCA to male 3.5mm cable and connect your iDevice to the system simply as an analogue source. Regards, Sieghard -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en.
