Sonos Music System Review

By Ian Bell May 24, 2005

Quote from our review:

“The Sonos Music system is all meshed up. That’s a good thing. A new twist on multi-room audio, Sonos uses a wireless mesh networking technology called Sonosnet to transmit music files from a home PC to up to 32 zones in the house (go slowly; it’s $900 per zone.) While remote music players from Linksys, Creative and others have sought to do the same thing using Wi-Fi, there’s always some household appliance that seems to get in the way in the 2.4-GHz airspace: a microwave oven, a cordless phone (at least, that’s the way it is in my house.) I can’t even get my PC in the basement some 20 feet away from the upstairs router to make a wireless connection over 802.11gâ€”even after hours on the phone with tech support.

But I could with the Sonos ZonePlayer, and without hours of aggravating setup. Mesh networking is the enabler. The Sonos controller communicates with the nearest ZonePlayer, and then that ZonePlayer communicates with the other ZonePlayers throughout the home instantaneously. As a result, the system can play in rooms that are out of range of the first ZonePlayer, and you enlarge your network as you add ZonePlayers. “

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