Seeing as this thread has now served my purpose it's being repurposed as the generic 'Sonos' thread. As such Lance thought it'd be a good idea to add the following to the first post for information: Different Sonos Products Sonos Play:1 - Perfect for smaller rooms, has two speakers (no input jack). RRP £169 Sonos Play:3 - Medium rooms, has 3 speakers (no input jack). RRP £259 Sonos Play:5 - Large rooms Has 5 speakers and an input jack. RRP £349 Sonos Connect - if you want to connect to an existing Hifi or home cinema via optical out or phono also has an input jack. RRP £279 Sonos Connect:Amp - if you want to connect to a pair of speakers and a sub also has an input jack. RRP £399 Sonos Bridge - Attach to your router to start your Sonos wifi. Not necessary if you have one of you units connected via cable to your router (no input jack). RRP £39 although free with a purchase of any Play product until January. (Also as such a lot of the early posts in the thread now no longer make sense as they were answering my original question - oh well )
http://www.raspyfi.com/ + Pi + Wifi/Ethernet ? And if you would use analog output, then : http://jeffskinnerbox.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/getting-audio-out-working-on-the-raspberry-pi/
I did. It is not perfect (library update never finished on my music library, but it is relatively huge and i never let it run for more than few hours ), but good for 1st release, the web UI works pretty good. If you got Pi at home, there is nothing easier than putting that distro on a SD card and try it out.
Let your phone do the wifi streaming and get one or two of these: http://minirigs.co.uk/ Added bonus you can take it anywhere with you. read the reviews on amazon and the net, it's quite amazing!
1) it runs headless only - you control is via web interface (if you don't take SSH linux console in account). 2) no, but default output is HDMI/USB DAC, so use the second link to configure your Pi to analog output.
Looks intriguing but not cheap! A raspberry pi with all the necessary gubbins plus some speakers wouldn't exactly be free but would probably come in at the cost of one of those but with stereo speakers. Also I can't see where it says that it's wireless... Thanks for the reply mate - I'll have a read through their website when I get a chance later on
A pet hate of mine is people that go: "oh you've said no sonos, here's an idea buy sonos." But I just feel that when its brought up that having used sonos for nearly a year now I absolutely love it and so does my missus, and I feel that its ease of use makes up for its high cost. If you can bare to wait, I'd say make a Sonos piece your xmas present or save a bit longer. If really can't afford it then what I've said is pointless, but I cannot sing the praise of Sonos enough, and I rarely don't have music playing in my flat these days because of it. Also, if you can run a Cat5 cable you could use converters as I do on my amp to my bathroom. If thats an option I will put some more info in. Its not great quality, but for my bathroom it doesn't need to be. I don't know if it would work over a powerline adapter? Maybe you could sell one of your keyboards to afford it.... /gets coat
A friend of mine uses an Apple airport express connected to an amp. If you want something smaller that a sono, then maybe you can connect it to amplified 2.0 /2.1 spreakers. iTunes sees the airport as a "sound card" and you can decide to send the audio flow to it. Just use your smartphone to controll iTunes. It should be findable second-hand for pretty cheap (saw one @25€ not long ago).
--Sorry I though you read the part where I stated to use your phone to do the wifi streaming.-- The reason for this is quite simple you can invest your money in quality speakers. Most phones have good DACs build in, Samsung is known as a leader in this and uses some of the best DACs seen in phones at the moment. You are completely correct good speakers are not cheap, but for the price the value/£ is best. I use just 1, in my Kitchen/dinning room and you just need to know how to position the speaker in the room to get very good sound. I personally rather have great mono over standard sterio but then I am a bit of a quality nut. If I had the money I would buy a external DAC (please do not suggest Fiio, they are like onboard sound and have zero quality control) Please read some reviews and then some customer reviews on amazon before you just write them off.
I use a Airport Express at the moment and have just downloaded RaspyFi to try its Airplay function to let me run another set of speakers. Sound quality is reasonable and after the last iTunes update I very rarely get any signal loss. The main disadvantage is that you can only play the same track through each set of speakers (unless you use mirroring which I've read is a little unpredictable) There is a thread on the XBMC website talking about proper multi-room with XBMC but there's nothing in place at the moment. I would give the PI a go and see how you get on.
I had a similar dilemma... I did the following: Got myself a pioneer 922 home cinema amp (£250). This has built in wifi and can stream from pcs, android or iphones,nas boxes etc. It also has a zone function which allows me to use it in 7.2 from the living room and run a stereo set of speakers from the same amp to the dining room. You can have either zone on or off independently. Its not wireless completely but its fair easy to hide some speaker wire, I ran mine along the skirting and painted over it. The advantage of this is it is dual purpose, so while outlay is a little more, you get much more flexibility using this method. on another note: if you stream music from your phone, surely its a digital signal which is then processed by the DAC in your amplifier? I dont know for sure but it seems odd to convert to analog then back to a digital stream then back to analog again... Hope that helps
HERESY!!! In all seriousness though the Sonoses (what's the plural of sonos? Soni perhaps?) do look great - also portable around the house as opposed to a raspberry pi + speaker combination. I'll look into that thanks - I'm not a fan of iTunes though so that may have to be a lower-down-the-list-but-not-quite-last resort I'll certainly read some reviews but if I'm going to go back to using my phone to stream over the wireless then I'll just get some 2.0 / 2.1 speakers and plug them into that - I'd prefer a 'not using my phone' option as that's what I've done in the past and I wasn't keen on that... Certainly sounds like a good solution but again a pricey one... Does fit my bill perfectly though in all other ways...
I BLOODY LOVE MY SONOS SET-UP. That is all. I know it's not that helpful, but I've had it for some three years now and wouldn't change it for the world. Christmas list. Sell a kidney. Sell a toe. Hell, sell anything, just not a keyboard (I've gone a bit funny this afternoon I think. Sorry, George.)
lol - better than being normal imo... The more I look into it the more I like the idea of a sonos... I'd need to add up the cost of the raspberry pi idea and then compare that with the ease and portability of a sonos...
Another vote for selling a body part & or relative, & then buying a sonos setup. Easy/painless in setup/use.
Oh I've not been normal for some years now... The beauty of Sonos is that it's easily expandable and you don't need to start with much to make it worthwhile. You can just get a Play:1 first and then if funds (and requirements) allow, just add bits to it - it's a piece of cake. I love it most because it wakes me up and I can just mash at a touch-screen to make music stop/start/louder/quieter first thing. Plus I can wake up guests in the spare room with 'amusing' music...
Haha yep, and if you add a Spotify account (which is so easy), the musical world is your oyster. I use the Sonos for streaming radio and Spotify more and more these days - it's all there on the controller ready to go. Plus - regular software updates incorporate epic new features. Have I convinced you yet?
