Sonos in the House

Finally I splashed out on some Sonos kit. I’ve had a Beam Soundbar for the TV a while now. I bought two SL1’s, because I did not want a bunch of offshore contract workers Alexa listening to my conversations. One SL1 went into my bedroom, to replace the Bose Colour II. The other went into the kitchen, to replace the little Roberts radio. And I got a Connect.

A lot of people complain about the cost of the Connect. If you have a CD-player (Marantz CD6005), radio tuner, turntable, tape deck or cassettes, which you play through a proper grown-up hi-fi amplifier (Maraztz PM 6003) through proper adult loudspeakers (B&W 686’s), or you have a headphone amp (Creek OBH-11) to power proper headphones (Sennhieser HD650), then the hi-fi is the centre of your listening life. What I really wanted to do is have what I’m playing on the CD also be played in the kitchen and maybe somewhere else, and for that, the Connect is compulsory.

The Connect also links my proper grown-up hi-fi to streaming music, which I did up to a couple of weeks ago by the very satisfactory iPod Touch and the Dragonfly + Jitterbug combination. Streaming the iPod Touch through the Connect blows the Dragonfly away. Nobody talks about how good the DAC on the Connect is.

Streaming through the Sonos app, all the speakers, even attached to the hi-fi, are in sync. Using Line-In, there is a small lag, about 200ms or so, between hi-fi speakers and the rest of the Sonos speakers. It’s only audible if you are close to both the hi-fi and a Sonos speaker.

I don’t know who developed the Sonos app, but they are among the very few proper developers designing apps and cutting code. It walked me through the set-up of each piece of equipment and detected everything. I can group rooms together, and remove rooms from a group, with a couple of taps at the screen. I can choose my Spotify, streaming radio, and Line-in (aka, the CD player). At some point I will add Bandcamp and Soundcloud to the Services. I really can play different music in each room at the same time.

Because I’m a late adopter, it took a while to discover how to add the files on my NAS to the app (Settings -> System -> Music Library -> Music Library Setup -> +Add Shared Music Folder and enter the "\\192.168.n.n\(root directory of your music files)”. Press Done and the app will tell you it will now scan that directory.) You won’t see anything happening, which confused me, until I went to Browse and found a big orange square with Music Library next to it, and the assurance it was scanning when I touched the icon. About twenty minutes later, all my digital music files were there. Why I’d do that when Spotify has (almost) everything, I’m not sure: I rip AAC, not WAV. Anyway, there it all is.

And if you really must stream from your Macbook, then you’ll need SonoAir  I’ve installed it and tried it, and I’m sure it will be useful when I need it, but it’s not going to be a thing.

Is it worth it? Absolutely. Will I be adding any more? Such as a pair to complement the Beam? Maybe.