Excellent device | Sonos ZP80 Digital Music System Bundle

Great way to get great wireless sound | Sonos ZP80 Digital Music System Bundle

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	• Sonos ZP80 Digital Music System Bundle Sonos Sonos average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fulfills the promise of digital music

Wouldn't it be great if you could access all of your music at any time in any room of your house and control it all with one central remote -- without rewiring your house? Well, now with Sonos you can and I have found that it works well.

The way it works is that you store your music on a computer and the Sonos system will bring it to every room in the house where you have a Sonos satellite unit. The units are wireless networking devices and amplifiers, so you plug them straight into your speakers in the rooms. They generate their own wireless network so don't worry about having a network already. (By the way, you can also plug a CD player or other source into the Sonos and route that into the speakers as well.)

In a phrase, the Sonos is like an iPod that controls your whole house.

Anyway, I feel this is sort of like a Tivo -- you don't realize you need it but once you use it and you can have access to all of your music and control your whole house from anywhere in the house, you won't want to go back for sure.

There are two ways to do it. Either you can rip all of your CD's to mp3 or if you have moved beyond CDs you can get a subscription music service (Rhapsody and Yahoo offer this now) and have that feeding your PC. Either way, the Sonos will get all of that music around the house.

The controller device (you only need one and it controls the whole house) is very convenient -- it's basically an iPod for your house. I found it very intuitive.

The set up was very easy.

I have found the sound quality to be very good. I don't feel I am making any sacrifices here. Mind you, I am not a super super audiophile running things through gold cables but it always sounds good to me.

Once in a while there is a hitch and something isn't working for a while. This is very unusal but in the interest of full disclosure it is not unknown. I personally believe this is 98% attributable to the Rhapsody system but anyway, it's not as 100% reliable as say a CD player. Anyway, the Sonos has never failed to come through on an important occasion so it's very much in my good graces.

I highly recommend the Sonos system.

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Excellent device

Got a Sonos set up today, it's a smooth system. It can draw on a file server without software running on some PC. It's the first system I've tried that actually works (Roku, Linksys, Netgear, blah blah blah are pretty poor). It time-syncs music across "zones" (you can group and unbroup sets of players) so it sounds smooth all over the house (tuning each volume level/EQ independently). It uses 802.11, but it's own subnet, so youi don't let it in your umbrella. One station connects to 10bT and bridges from your network to its network. I gave it it's own user name with restricted rights to my network (just the music server) just in case there are holes in its security. It also has line level input at each station, so you can stream audio back out from any remote location. Will haul in internet stations with or without subscriptions.

Disadvantages:
Won't display video/JPGs to a TV (no video output)
The PC client (for remote control, easy playlist editing) won't spit out audio (so your PC is not part of the party, which is kind of lame)
The click wheel doesn't work as well as apple's
Unknown security issues

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Great way to get great wireless sound

I plugged this in last weekend for one my clients, and it works superbly. We connected one ZP80 to a set of Polk Atrium 45p speakers, and another ZP80 to a set of Advent AV70? speakers, and they sound great. I recommend these for use with smaller speakers, as they will deliver enough satisfactory sound. For larger speakers, though, I recommend the ZP100, with its built in amplifier.

Set-up of the ZP80 was remarkably easy. I do wish the 2-minute "activation" period was a little bit longer so I wouldn't have to run around to connect each machine to the wireless subnet that the Sonos systems create and use.

The remote is big, bulky, somewhat heavy, and the scroll wheel is difficult to use, especially if you are accustomed to using an iPod scroll wheel. Actually, I suspect that the scroll wheel is just a couple vertical and horizontal heat sensors packaged as a scroll wheel. If you can get over this small disadvantage, this product is great.

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Up and running in 10 minutes

This couldn't be easier to install, or use. My wife, who looks at any new technology with a combination of fear and distrust, took the Sonos controller in her hands and set up a music queue in seconds. The system is intuitive and user-friendly. The setup took all of 10 minutes - it actually took longer for the system to index my 43,000 song collection than it did to set up the hardware.

When I had a couple of tech support questions (nothing wrong with the system, just curious about a couple of things) I e-mailed Sonos and received a non-automated response in about an hour from customer support saying I'd be hearing from Tech Support, and a couple of hours later a friendly answer to my questions.

I have nothing but great things to say about the system. It's costly, but it's worth it.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3

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