I first heard about Sonos from Volker (who has been raving about the
system for ages), and I finally succumbed to the temptation when I read about
the S5. I got mine delivered yesterday. Thomas Lang of ueberall-
musik.de supplied it, and I had it set up within minutes. Not hours or
days – minutes. The S5 is a small box which packs quite a whump and
sounds very good. Plug in the supplied power cord and an Ethernet
cable, attach that to your router, launch the software, and music will start
playing shortly. Music from your NAS, Internet Radio, what have you. If you
don’t have an Ethernet point near wherever you want to place the S5,
Sonos has a solution in the form of a minature Zone Bridge which you
cable to your network. It then provides music to multiple Zone Players
wirelessly.
To control a Sonos player (called a Zone Player) you use
either the provided Desktop Controller, a well-designed desktop computer
program, a rather expensive Sonos Controller, or an iPod Touch or iPhone
running the Sonos App, which is free of charge from the App store. Details
that amaze and fascinate me include changing the volume on the S5 moves the
volume slider on the iPhone app in real time. Integration at its very finest!
If you get an S5 you’ll quickly find out that I lie in the title. It
should have read: All you want for Christmas is lots of Sonos equipment.
Believe me. (Sigh.)