Test drive: the Sonos Digital Music System

Richard Cree tests out the latest wireless multi-room music system from Sonos

The phenomenal success of Apple’s iPod and the recent boom in the number of people either downloading music from online music stores or copying CDs onto their computer, means that lots of us now have plenty of music stored on home computers. While MP3 players allow us to take that music with us when we leave the house, it’s been a little harder to play that music anywhere around the house. Talk of throwing out all those CDs has remained about as realistic as the idea of the paper-free office.

While some have gone to the trouble (and considerable expense) of wiring their homes for multi-room audio-visual systems, most people find that the music stored on a computer is available through the speakers attached to the computer and that’s it.

Enter the Sonos wireless music system. When it first hit the UK market, What Hi-Fi? called the Sonos system “the hottest thing to hit hi-fi in years”.  And despite the arrival of other wireless networking and AV systems, it has remained a firm favourite.

To see what all the fuss was about, I took a Sonos start-up bundle home to test it.

When it comes to gadgets often the first hurdle is getting the system up and running. But Sonos has looked to Apple for more than just design inspiration and the system offers the sort of “plug and play” set-up that many products boast but few manage to pull off.

Having set up the system, the first (and pretty much only) gripe is that because one of the boxes has to be connected to the computer via an Ethernet cable, the starter bundle doesn’t allow for music in more than one other room (unless you want to move the other zone player around the house). The starter bundle should include another player. To really get started you’d need to get another zone player, which means shelling out £269 for the ZP80 or £379 for the ZP100, which includes an inbuilt 50W digital amplifier).

This small issue aside, the quality of the system is immediately clear.

It immediately picked up the music from my iTunes library, complete with all the playlists. Thanks to the continued problems of digital rights, the system doesn’t support music purchased in Apple iTunes online music store,  but it has recently announced a software upgrade that means it will support music from several other online music stores. Streaming compressed, digital music files around the home will never result in the sort of sound quality that true audiophiles look for, but played through a decent stereo system the ZP80—which requires an external amplifier—it is easily a match for most mainstream systems. But the real star of the Sonos system is the iPod-inspired handset, complete with its own scroll-wheel. Able to control all zone players from anywhere—and the system can support a mansion-filling 32 zones—the handset is built to a high quality, feels good to hold and is engaging and intuitive to use. Anyone familiar with an iPod will soon appreciate the device’s iPod-inspired design. The only drawback to it was that once I’d picked it up I didn’t really want to put it down.

If, like me, you have thousands of music tracks stored on a computer, this system offers a relatively low-cost and very convenient way to play that music anywhere around the house. 

The Sonos ZP80 Bundle costs £799. The ZP100 bundle (in which the players are fitted with in-built digital amplifiers) costs £949. Each additional ZP80 costs £269, each ZP100 £379.

For more information visit: www.simplysonos.com