In Reply to: Wow, just saw a TV ad for Sonos! posted by rlw on October 26, 2014 at 16:48:30:
I took a long, hard look at Sonos back in 2010 after I purchased a NAS and ripped my music collection. I really wanted to go with Sonos because their user interface and multi-room support was pretty unique. I ended up not doing it because I moved overseas shortly after and spent the last few years living in a small place where multi-room wasn't needed. Now I'm back in a house with multiple rooms and systems, and I had a look at Sonos again. My impression is that they haven't really kept up the pace of development. Some of the shortcomings are:
- Still no support for hi-res files
- Still no support for AirPlay or Bluetooth (the latter I don't care about)
- Poor TV/HT integration
- Lack of user profiles or some equivalent way to deal with multiple household members having different accounts for the same online service and/or different favorites. This limitation is hardly unique to Sonos, but I would have expected a company focusing on whole housesold solutions would have done something to account for multiple users.
- No remote access to your music library
Now there are a lot of alternative ways to approach multi-room streaming audio which didn't exist 5 years ago. I feel like Sonos is standing pat and not improving their basic product aside from adding more and more internet streaming services.
Anyway, I gave up on the idea that one company could satisfy all my streaming audio needs and ended up mixing & matching products from several companies including a couple of Linn DS players, a Pioneer N-50, a Pioneer SMA3 wireless portable rechargable speaker, a Marantz AV8801, and a Roku 3. NAS is a Windows Home Server box running Twonky. One might think that's an integration or usability nightmare but it all works.
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Follow Ups
- Sonos is getting stale - Dave_K 12:03:11 10/28/14 (0)