The Sonos S5 is the newest Zoneplayer from Sonos, which is being marketed as an iPod dock without the dock. For those not familiar with the Sonos multizone audio system, it’s basically a wifi audio system that let’s you play music all over your home. The type of Zoneplayer you need depends on what home audio equipment you already own, if you already have home audio receivers i.e. your 5.1 or 7.1 system, then all you need is the ZP 90 and a PC or a Mac, install the Sonos Controller on your PC, plugin the ZP 90 to the home audio receivers and the wireless router and you’re good to go. If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch..awesome!, download the free Sonos Controller app so you can control your Sonos S5 or ZP 90 wirelessly.
Setting up a Sonos Zoneplayer is really easy, once you install the included software in a CD, all you need to do is press the connect and volume (+) button on the Zoneplayer, press these buttons again to add an iPhone or iPod touch controller and you should be able to control it wirelessly in about 5 seconds.
When you setup a Sonos system in your home, you basically create a wireless network called SonosNet that is separate from your home wireless internet network. Other wireless streaming routers like the Apple Airport Express is prone to stutter if other members of the family are surfing, downloading files and or playing online games. With SonosNet, you won’t encounter the same problem, this is one of the key strengths of Sonos.
Sonos supports all the most popular audio formats, including MP3s and iTunes®. And it will also make it easy to play music from other audio sources, like an iPod® or CD player. If you have a music library stored on your computer, Sonos will play it all. You’ll also be able to enjoy more than 100,000 free Internet radio stations, shows and podcasts. Imagine listening to radio stations from far flung corners of the world from BBC in UK to 104.9 FM in Sydney Australia to local internet streamed radio stations like NPR here in the US, I really love this internet radio feature, I have discovered a lot of new music by listening to foreign internet radio stations.
There’s plenty of competing wifi music player in the market, there’s the Squeezebox Duet, Apple TV, Apple Airport Express and then there’s the kind that caters to the audiophile market. I tried them all except the high end audiophile grade systems, I will compare the Sonos S5 and the ZP 90 with the other music systems for home in my next post.
