welcome to part one 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 an 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 one and the play three their entry l/ portable unit and
their mid-range unit respectively they do have a higher end play five for
larger rooms but I'm apparently too much 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 network 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 all
right cool lenus 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-size music collection its search functionality
doesn't look in your locally stored fil and even just scrolling through your list of songs is laggy 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 analog 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
Sonos system can keep doing whatever you told it to do even if you get out of
range or your phone battery dies okay 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 okay 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 and
lots of places so I'm still running everything over Ethernet in the next
video I'll talk about their wireless bridge and the less 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 simp 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 and now that
feels entirely pointless with Sonos is integrated tune in Internet radio
support yeah I don't need that anymore the inapp search still sucks but I was
able to manually navigate to all my favorite 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 contined to be really disappointed in its lack cluster
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 layo 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 Sonos system I'm about
as happy as I could be I actually just signed up for Google music as pre
musices music's premium service and uh
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 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 sons's use of the term HiFi to describe these speakers I've
only used the play one and 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 beach generation with
overdone base a little bit of trouble and a mid-range that goes Way Beyond
veiled and unfortunately the EQ setting
are one of the weakest points of the advanced settings within their app so
with only simple base 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 high-i experience with better amps stxs and speakers they're 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 my 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 Sonos 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 ENT 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
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