Sonos world

 I know that Sonos audio products are high quality and expensive, but I have never been very tempted to get to know them better.  My home music listening is provided by an aging but good quality Sony hifi with impressive Eltax speakers.  In addition to a CD player (rarely used) and Tuner (non-DAB, little used) I have an RPi with USB DAC connected to the hifi which I use predominantly.  The RPi runs the venerable MPD (music player daemon) to play my albums, compilations, radio stations and chart downloads and I have developed a comprehensive web front-end application to control the system.  Although I am not considering swapping over to Sonos in my study, they could be installed elsewhere.   

 Alex has recently donated four Sonos Play:1 speakers to us and the time has come to see how good the sound is and how easy they are to setup and use.  The speakers are small but perfectly formed.  Sound is very clear and there is an impressive depth/bass considering how small they are.  Although they are very expensive they hold their value well and the five year-old models we have are worth about £80 each.  They are usually connected to wifi, although they do have bluetooth and ethernet interfaces, so there is no problem with cables snaking around the room/house.

Configuration

I decided to set the speakers up as two stereo pairs.  Configuration needs to be done using an Android or IoS app on a phone/iPad on the same wifi network as the speakers.  Setup was troublesome until we did a factory reset on each speaker.  I could then create a Sonos network for the house and add the speakers in.  The Sonos procedure does a good job of finding the devices, networking them and making them part of a system  As I had allocated the speakers to two locations Sonos suggested I use them as a stereo pair and identified left and right speakers for me.

Music

Sonos is geared up to work with paid music services, such as Spotify which I don't really like and I don't subscribe to.  To start off with the only music available is Sonos radio, which isn't much use but does let us check the speakers are working.  I added a Samba shared folder on my RPi NAS which contains the music I listened to and this provided me with plenty to listen to.  My music doesn't always have very good mp3tags as it comes from a variety of sources so it is best to access it via folder names rather than albums.  I could have added music libraries from my phone or iPad but as I don't expect to be the primary user I didn't.

The Sonos app makes it easy to control music from iPad or phone.  There is also a Windows Controller which I tend to use most.

Adding a TuneIn account and linking it to Sonos allows me to play a wide variety of radio stations.  There is a paid version, with a 7 day free trial.  I hope it isn't needed for playing common commercial stations.

Connectivity

So far the setup has used standard features.  My impression is that Sonos is generally a closed system and doing things differently from the way you want to would be difficult.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Bubbleupnp app I use could see and play music on Sonos devices without difficulty.

Home Assistant integration is stunningly simple.  Within a couple of minutes I could setup Sonos within HA and play any accessible music.

Finally I found that, if I want to, I can specify my MPD output as a stream into Sonos so I could play any music / source that I currently use through my web application.

Conclusion

I was very pleased and a little surprised at Sonos capabilities and compatibility.  It is the pre-eminent high quality music system so it should be good.  I have seen complaints that Sonos want you to upgrade to the latest equipment with new features, but the old speakers we have work well with the software.  The most impressive feature, by far, is the ability to listen to separate music on combinations of speakers throughout the house.  I know this isn't easy to achieve and I think this is where a proprietary environment is worthwhile.  I was also pleased that non-revenue-generating functions are not shut out.  You can listen to your own music on your own NAS or utilise your speakers in a limited fashion from other apps,