Cisco Challenges Sonos in Wireless Home Audio

The company's new offerings are immature, but may hold more potential than Sonos' pricy alternative.

I’ve been spending the last week playing World of Warcraft on my new Mitsubishi 60-inch TV, and moving music around the home. We’ll talk about the TV experience in a future post, but I’ve been covering products that pretend to move media around the home for some time, and most turn out to be really disappointing. The biggest problem, for some reason, is the concept of a “party mode.” This is when you have multiple speaker systems playing the same song. Your parents and grandparents likely could do this in audio systems they had in their homes, why is it so difficult for anyone else to make this work?

Up until recently, only one affordable system that I have tested would do this, and that was Sonos, which is the benchmark against which I compare everyone else. Well, it turns out, Cisco’s Linksys group has now done it as well, and its solution has a number of interesting differences with the Sonos product.

Dedicated Network vs. Wi-Fi

To create what is a very reliable product, Sonos developed its own mesh network, which stands alone and propagates itself with every Sonos offering you install. This has the advantage of making it both relatively secure, and very easy to set up. The disadvantage is that it may interfere with other wireless devices, and it lacks the bandwidth to do anything other than audio (although you can plug a computer into some of the Sonos media extenders and get a slow connection to your home network).

Cisco uses Wi-Fi, and this makes the devices more difficult to set up, but the result can be centrally managed, so that it doesn’t interfere with whatever else you are doing. This is important as the market moves to video, and you increasingly need to free up bandwidth to move video around the home. Cisco has already released a router, the WRT610N, which proved a separate band for video, and anticipates a line of extenders which doesn’t exist yet. Cisco’s offerings come with a software product which generates a graphical topology map of your network so you can see what is hooked to it (which could be a leeching neighbor) and help you discover anything that shouldn’t be there. In the end, this is likely a better long-term approach because it is integrated, and should allow for automated problem identification and resolution.

Product Breadth

The Sonos offering has two extenders called ZonePlayers: one with an amplifier and one without, in both white and silver. There is a lot of “make” to this offering, which is to say it was clearly costly to build, and the case itself is designed to dissipate heat. Sonos makes a remote control and charging base, and you need this remote or a PC to operate the products. Lowest entry price, as a result, is around $800 for the controller, charging base, and the least expensive extender. Recently, the company brought out an iPhone/iPod Touch application which turns one of these into a controller, but you still need an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Cisco enters with the more common black scheme, a more contemporary design language, and a vastly larger product line. At the top of the line is the Conductor, which hasn’t released yet and I didn’t test. It has a large screen that could eventually do video, and built-in speakers. Down from that is the Director, at $449, with a smaller display and an amplifier (speakers are $150 extra) and a non-display IR remote. Another step down is the Player at $299, with no display and no amplifier, but which has the same IR remote. There’s also a wireless controller with a display, like the Sonos, at $349, and an iPod Dock for $79.99. You could start with just the Director and live off its display for $600 with the speakers (if you get this as a kit you save $50 and it is called the “Executive Kit”) and add Players for every additional room. However, the players, like the Sonos products, need something with a display to navigate. So I’d be tempted to use Directors, and simply not use the speakers in rooms where I was plugging into an amp, saving on the cost of the $350 remote.

Finally, Cisco has one more product which I’ve been using for some time, and that its Media Hub. It starts at $299 without a display, and packs 500 GB. You can get one with a display for about $50 more, and the one with both a display and a terabyte of storage is $429. Both the Sonos and the Cisco offerings connected to the Media Hub seamlessly.

Services

Sonos has been around longer, and has a variety of music services you can connect the device into including Rhapsody, Pandora, Napster, Sirius, and others. Both will connect to your own music on your network, but as of this writing, Cisco only does Rhapsody. Granted, if you had to pick one, Rhapsody would be one of my first choices. But my favorite, Slacker, isn’t supported by either at the moment.

From my own experience, I actually enjoy listening to a music service more than my own tracks, because there is less to set up and manage, and the music remains fresh.

Wrapping Up and Recommendations

If you are planning on doing the entire house on day one, the Sonos is likely your better choice. It is easier to set up, and the network expands to cover your home. In addition, if you are already wed to one of the many services that Sonos covers, you’ll likely prefer that offering.

If you are primarily just looking for one or two rooms initially, and don’t know if you will ever do more, the Cisco is the better path. Its Director is self contained, and does one room for a more affordable price than the Sonos does. In addition, this is a new system, and it will likely advance significantly over time to include more services and video. So as a long term strategic purchase, it is more likely to grow with your needs, where the Sonos is already very mature.

If you need a media repository, I remain very impressed with the Cisco Media Hub, which will work with both systems, and is a one of the best NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices I’ve ever used.