Tech Savvy Mama

Parenting in the Digital Age

Sonos Play 3: Future of Home Audio

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The Sonos Play 3 streaming audio player gives you instant access to your digital music library and streaming internet audio settings from anywhere in your house.

I had a chance to try out the Sonos Play 3 streaming music system and was very impressed. Taking it out of the box, the Sonos Play 3 looks like a single bookshelf speaker. It has no screen, minimal lights, and pretty much looks like a “just a speaker.”  But hidden inside the unit is the future of home entertainment.
The Sonos unit pulls music from your home PCs and Macs, and also has the ability to stream internet radio and music from many of the popular online music services. This includes: Last.fm, Pandora, Rhapsody, SiriusXM, Spotify, iheartradio, and others.
Sonos dispenses with the things you already have:  A hard drive full of music, an internet connection, and a smartphone or tablet to use as a remote. Does anyone really need ANOTHER remote in the house?  No. Perfect, Sonos doesn’t ship with one.
Sonos Play 3 comes in black or white

The Play 3 connects to your home internet connection via Ethernet, or the optional wireless Sonos Bridge. Once you have one Sonos unit in the house, they have the ability to communicate between themselves and form a wireless mesh network, extending their range. If you have multiple units, you can play the same thing around the entire house, or different soundtracks in each room. It’s all controlled from “elsewhere”, meaning a Mac, PC, Android or iPhone / iPad.

Controlling the unit from a mobile phone is a breeze. I downloaded the app on Android and was able to add songs to my queue, change radio stations, and browse my music easily. The Android App did a spectacular job of navigating through our enormous iTunes library. For example, when browsing by artist, it was fast and painless to scroll through a list of hundreds of band names to get to ones farther down in the alphabet. I wish my car stereo could handle it that well.

 

The Sonos Play 3 unit feels very solid and well built. The speakers put out great audio, including bass, which is hard to do in a small package. The Play 3 has 1 tweeter, 2 mid-range speakers, and 1 bass radiator. It’s a single unit, with the left and right channels of audio coming from within the unit.  For those that want to get fancy, you can purchase a 2nd Play 3 unit and set them up as a stereo pair for true separation of Left and Right channels.
Setup was pretty simple. I connected the unit to an Ethernet port and ran through the App on my Mac. I had some problems, which turned out to be entirely of my own doing, but customer support was very knowledgeable and helpful, even on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. They had my problem solved in about 5 minutes of time. I also installed the App on a Windows 7 system without issue.
Connect Sonos via Ethernet or optional Sonos Bridge

To access your music on your computer (PC or Mac), it uses server message block (SMB) sharing. The installer guides you through it and it’s quite painless. One thing that really threw me off was that the Sonos installer wanted to completely disable sleep on my computer. It said this was necessary to ensure interrupted playback. Many computers can wake from sleep automatically upon receiving traffic from the network, but the Sonos doesn’t support using this method. Strange. If you want the Sonos to be ready to go anytime (to play music from your PC), your music library has to be available anytime.  One way around this is to store your music on a network-attached storage drive. Not a bad idea.

My fear is that if I put my primary iTunes library on a network attached storage (NAS) drive, then I have no music locally on my computer itself, and it’s harder to back up the iTunes library since Time Machine only backs up things connected directly to my computer. Hard drive space is cheap, so I could put a COPY of my iTunes library on the NAS, but then how do I auto-update it?  It would require an automatic system like super-duper or other utility to do nightly or weekly dumps of iTunes to the NAS. This starts to seem complicated.
After thinking about it, I realize that maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Perhaps I should be thinking up in the cloud. Everything is in “the cloud” today. Sonos won’t stream form Apple’s iCloud service. But it does work with Spotify and a bunch of other previously named services. If you have a Spotify Premium account ($9.99 a month) then it will play music directly from Spotify’s servers on the Internet. And Spotify can sync with your iTunes music library.

It is nice to have yet another way to access my music but one thing I’m constantly struggling with is finding new music that I like. Here’s where Sonos’ internet-based streaming features really shine. The Sonos unit directly links to hundreds of internet radio stations, both internet-based and regular FM radio stations with streaming services. Finding and adding stations was easy. With just a few clicks I was listening to some quality Internet radio. And songs I enjoyed!

Here’s something neat you can do on Sonos: Channel surf between DC101, WFNX, C89.5, BBC Radio 1, and Live 105 seamlessly while cooking breakfast. That’s DC101 in DC, WFNX in Boston, C89.5 in Seattle, Live 105 in San Francisco, and of course, London’s BBC 1 in the UK. That’s pretty cool to be able to do from a PC, and even better to be able to do from any room of the house.
In summary, the Sonos streaming music player provides you with high quality speakers and a great user interface for listening to your digital music collection or tapping into the Internet’s vast assortment of streaming audio.
Pros:
  • High quality hardware
  • Great sound
  • Excellent interface
Cons:
  • Needs separate Bridge unit for wireless. Won’t use your existing Wifi router.
  • Wants to prevent you from sleeping your PC.    
Sonos products received for review:

If my review of the Sonos Play 3 has enticed you into purchasing one of your own,Target is offering a free Sonos Bridge ($49.99) with an in-store purchase of either a Sonos Play 3 or Sonos Play 5. This unadvertised offer is only good in store for Sonos 3 or 5 until June 9 making it a perfect Father’s Day or graduation gift!


I received both the Sonos Play 3 and Sonos Bridge for review purposes and was compensated for my time in setting up the system and writing this review although all opinions are my own and based on personal experience with the products.

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Original post by Tech Savvy Mama
©2012

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Comments

  2. Stimey says

    So, we recently outfitted our house with Sonos. And by “we,” I mean my totally overexcited husband. Sonos is his new best friend. Sonos may even be considered one of his children now. He LOVES Sonos. (Also, I am loathe to admit it, but I kinda love Sonos too.) We now have speakers in three rooms and can group them to play the same music on all of them or play different things on each of them. Controlling it from our iDevices is fun and easy too and makes for excellent music battles between my husband and I.

    Love Sonos. Purchase Sonos. Sonos is good.

  3. Alexis says

    This sounds really cool….and since YOU are the one who introduced me to TiVo those MANY years ago, I think this would also be a cool addition to our techy home!

  4. Gabe Gonzalez says

    Just bought it! Thanks for telling us about the Target deal! Also, I may be a bit dense, but is it possible to just have an external hard drive connected in some way to Sonos (bridge or component)?

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