Wait. What? Why didn’t anyone tell me how awesome Sonos has become?!? I feel like such a techno loser right now for not being up to date on the Sonos revolution.
Yes, I have heard of Sonos before. But the idea that they were some proprietary mid-range expensive music system with a shitty remote was stuck in my head. Turns out that is no longer the case.
My main goal was to have a way to stream music from different Internet services like Pandora or rdio in the kitchen in a seamless way. I had tried a wireless bluetooth speaker, but bluetooth is so spotty that connecting from my Android was difficult at best. So I started looking at alternative solutions and came back to Sonos.
And I was impressed. Once I figured it all out.
I have to say that the Sonos line is somewhat confusing until you figure out what exactly it is that you need. There are speakers and bridges and remotes. Well, as it turns out all you need is one of their speakers – the Play 3 or the Play 5 – and a wireless bridge. You can now use your desktop, Android, iPhone/iPad to control what is playing instead of that kludgy remote control.
I bought the Play 3 from Amazon for $299 and the bridge for $49. Setup couldn’t be easier. It took about 1 minute and I didn’t bother reading any of the instructions. Just plug the bridge into the router and plug in the speaker. Install the app and voila, it instantly is ready to go. I have a NAS that also picked up my music library so I can play local MP3s without having a computer open.
The sound is pretty darned good. I hear that the Play 5 has way better sound quality, but I liked the portability of the Play 3 so I went with that.
There are a few wishlist items that I have, however. I really wish that I could play my Amazon Cloud music from the player. It would be cool to have my Google Reader podcasts play through the unit as well. I use Stitcher, but I want to be able to get archived podcasts. I also wish that I could do line-in for my home theater without having to buy a more expensive Connect unit.
I love my Sonos Play 3 so much that I ended up purchasing another speaker already so I can stop dragging this one around the house to listen. Can’t wait to be able to play music from anywhere!
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