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.

Catch-Up

I’ve missed a lot of posts this month. It’s a darn good thing I don’t do this for a living.

One reason is that I’ve been working on a particular project, and that has taken a lot of the little spare time I have. (Said every blogger ever at least once.) No, I’m not telling you what it is.

Another is that my mother has been in and out of hospital, and that’s more time- and attention-consuming than one might think. It’s family stuff and therefore complicated and not for discussion as it happens.

I’ve been fighting off a cold as well for about a week, probably as a result of standing around too many cold, damp South West Trains stations so I can visit my mother in hospital. And go to work.It got the better of me this weekend.

I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything in the news. Too many You Tubers do that and listening to them after a while starts to feel echo-chamber-y. Reading the Guardian, which I did for a while to see what ‘They’ were thinking, is now painful. Even browsing the Financial Times makes me wince. Seems the Fifth Columnists are still alive, virtue-signalling and trying to spread despair. Understand that the majority of news articles are about raising money for some charity, cause or government agency or department, and you will see that the print media is not about news. News is something somebody it’s about doesn’t want you to read: everyone wants you to read about how they need more money or the sky will fall in.

I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything that’s going on in my life, or that I’ve been reading. I am leading the classic ‘figure-eight life’ as somebody described it, and once you’ve been round the figure-eight once, that’s all you’re going to see.

Yep, I went in and back-filled the missing posts on Blogger.

John Adams: The Chairman Dances

Radio 3’s favourite minimalist for a long while. I saw Nixon In China a long time ago, and I don’t recall any special dancing when this was playing.

Nils Frahm: Says

Nils Frahm was born many years after Riley, Glass and Reich popularised Minimalism. It was probably just another influence on him. Says is a wonderful piece of music. Headphones, sit back and let it do its thing.

Steve Reich: Music for Eighteen Musicians

One of Steve Reich’s top five best sellers. For a long time it could only be performed by his own ensemble, because the notation was incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t played in the ensemble. I saw the first performance by another band at the Queen Elizabeth Hall many, many years now. The appetiser was a piece by Terry Fernyhough, which is somewhere else you can miss without missing anything.

Philip Glass: Glassworks

While we’re talking about Minimalism, let’s mention Philip Glass and this album, which everyone who saw Koyaanisatski rushed out and bought the following Saturday.

Terry Riley: In C

Ah, but maybe you have never heard Terry Riley’s In C. My generation did, because John Peel would play it on his Saturday afternoon show, between Principal Edwards Magic Theatre (don’t go there) and Captain Beefheart. In C was the first Minimalist piece to become famous. Every other minimalist owes their bank accounts to In C and Terry Riley.