Gadgetory

welcome to part 1 of my Sonos review they actually sent over so much stuff I didn't really know where to begin so I decided to split it up into two videos and start with a walkthrough of my experience setting it up for the first time with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts so let's kick this off with wTF is Sonos well normally I would try to put this in my own words quite frankly they describe it better than I can Sonos is an app controlled system that lets you control your music collection from any device and lets you play what you want in any room or every room over your home network so these are two of their speaker units the play 1 and the play 3 their entry level / portable unit and their mid-range unit respectively they do have a higher end play 5 for larger rooms but I'm apparently too much of a scrub for them to send me one of those so inside the box you'll find a Quick Start Guide in a variety of languages a power cord an ethernet cable and your fancy new speaker that's about it they're about as easy to set up as anything that I have ever configured normally I see networked device and I prepare to beat my head against the wall for an hour or two but you actually just plug it into your router then fire up the app on your phone which prompts you to press a couple of buttons on your speaker and it's done nearly instantly it's so easy that my wife could have set it up almost as quickly as I did alright cool - but what's the point well when you've only got one speaker at first I'd have said it's kind of like any random Bluetooth speaker I was using the Sonos app to play music stored locally on my phone over Wi-Fi and I was a little disappointed playback was stutter free so for just continuously streaming a playlist it was perfect but the app is just not suitable for managing even a medium-sized music collection it's search functionality doesn't look in your locally stored files and even just scrolling through your list of songs is leggy and unresponsive so I kept exploring and glory be on their website I found out that aside from the usual iOS and Android phone and tablet apps they have a desktop app too all right now they've got my attention even though they neglected to put an analogue input on the things they're letting me legitimately control it from anywhere neat back to the app I found some more options you can stream from an iTunes library windows media streamer and even better than that for people like me whose music file tags are a mess because they still have music from CDs they ripped with music match jukebox they have a folder based navigation schema to just pick songs you want to play and cue them up or put them in a playlist this is cool because using it this way unlike a Bluetooth speaker your sono system can keep doing whatever you told it to do even if you get out of range or your phone battery dies ok but back to streaming my phone's local content again I wanted to try something and turned off my Wi-Fi midstream it's got quite the buffer on it but of course after a little while the music stopped then I turned my Wi-Fi back on and bam music was playing again so at this point I was like ok this is actually getting pretty cool depending how you want to use it you can make it so that when you get home your music plays to greet you and when you go out of range it stops fantastic so next I added the second speaker in another room my house has Ethernet and powerline networking in lots of places so I'm still running everything over Ethernet in the next video I'll talk about their wireless bridge and the wireless functionality but anyway this is where things started to get really interesting adding another speaker is as simple as firing up the app and pressing the buttons again and it's connected within seconds you assign your speakers to a room name and now you can either play completely different content in each of those places or something I figured out how to do with VLC a few years back after a few hours of tinkering and a PC hooked up in each speaker location with the click of a button you can group them together so the music is perfectly synced in every room as you move around your house it's great for staying in your groove when you're cleaning and this is exactly how I could see myself falling into their trap just keep saving pennies and adding speakers until the whole house is hooked up damn what a great product but it actually continued to get better I actually just recently finally got around to picking up an antenna on Amazon for my receiver so I could listen to the radio I'm so old now that feels entirely pointless with sonís is integrated tuning internet radio support yeah I don't need that anymore the in-app search still sucks but I was able to manually navigate to all my favourite stations local and otherwise in the searches defense though it does manage to find podcasts like twit so I guess it's not totally useless but I still found myself yearning for another option the app is okay I mean it's got a four plus star rating on the Play Store and the advanced options are pretty comprehensive so as a setup tool it's fantastic but I was continued to be really disappointed in its lackluster integration with the rest of my Android OS little things like unless it was in the foreground pressing my volume up or volume down wouldn't change music but my ringtone instead and I found myself really wishing that I could use another app for music management and then just stream it by clicking a little button like with my Apple TV and after some more digging around I found it now clicking add music services in the app just brings up a bunch of lame-o's stuff because unlike the rest of the developing world in Canada we don't have cool streaming services like Amazon Pandora and Spotify services that appear to be what Sonos made these products for but then I discovered the best thing ever in the last couple of months two things have happened Google Play Music launched in Canada and Sonos integrated it into the Google Music app so you can use it exactly the way I wanted you just have something you know running on your headphones you press a button boom it's playing over your sono system I'm about as happy as I could be I actually just signed up for Google musics is preview zzyx use extreme service and it's like the best thing ever I control music volume naturally I can properly navigate my local content I can stream content it's fantastic this is one of those very rare products that took about a day to convince me to legitimately change the way I go about my daily life not many things can do that but if all of this sounded like a Sonos commercial up until now I guess this is the part where they decide not to slip me that Benjamin for my review after all I strongly disagree entirely with so Knossos use of the term hi-fi to describe these speakers i've only used the play one in the play three so far but while the speakers themselves might actually be fine what Sonos calls warm full-bodied sound is apparently equivalent to what I call tuned for the beat generation with overdone bass a little bit of trouble and a mid-range that goes way beyond veiled and unfortunately the EQ settings are one of the weakest points of the advanced settings within their app so with only simple bass and treble sliders so I couldn't even really find out if the speakers are better than they sound I mean I guess there's good news though if you're one of those people who's willing to spend way too much for an actual hi-fi experience with better amp stacks and speakers there in my opinion unjustifiably expensive given they seem to have the same functionality as the other stuff but without an actual speaker connect series lets you add your own stuff to your sono setup but most people myself included likely won't care enough to bother with that expense if you're not cranking things up I have to grudgingly admit that the warm sound signature works really well for background music which is exactly what I personally intend to use my so nose gear for so I'll probably just stick with the speakers and I guess that's it that's how part one of this review ends Sonos is gear particularly the software is just so different from other solutions that i've tried for managing audio around my home it is such a joy to use that throughout the entire experience I was able to enjoy my music as i tinkered with it and not once did it frustrate me to the point that I needed to stop working on the review and go do something else for a little while something that happens a lot highly recommended so far if you've got enough shiny pennies to afford it in part two I'll be adding the wireless bridge and some more speakers to the home setup and I'll be hooking up their play bar to my media center with a couple of play ones linked up as surround speakers let me know if there's anything else that you'd like to hear about thanks for watching part one of my Sonos review guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have well comments and of course that thing I just asked you to calm about comment about like 10 seconds ago you could leave a comment about that if you like our videos please do check out the support us link in the video description you can buy a t-shirt you can give us a monthly contribution you can change your Amazon bookmarks to ones with our affiliate code so that every time you buy anything like dental floss we get a small affiliate kickback it really does help us out a lot thanks again for watching guys and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips