WEBVTT

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welcome to part one of my Sonos review they actually sent over so much stuff I

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didn't really know where to begin so I decided to split it up into two videos

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and start with a walkthrough of my experience setting it up for the first

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time with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an

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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts

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so let's kick this off with WTF is Sonos

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well normally I would try to put this in my own words quite frankly they describe

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it better than I can Sonos is an app controlled system that lets you control

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your music collection from any device and lets you play what you want in any

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room or every room over your home network so these are two of their

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speaker units the play one and the play three their entry l/ portable unit and

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their mid-range unit respectively they do have a higher end play five for

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larger rooms but I'm apparently too much a scrub for them to send me one of those

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so inside the box you'll find a quick start guide in a variety of languages a

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power cord an Ethernet cable and your fancy new speaker that's about it

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they're about as easy to set up as anything that I have ever configured

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normally I see network device and I prepare to beat my head against the wall

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for an hour or two but you actually just plug it into your router then fire up

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the app on your phone which prompts you to press a couple of buttons on your speaker and it's done nearly instantly

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it's so easy that my wife could have set it up almost as quickly as I did all

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right cool lenus but what's the point well when you've only got one speaker at

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first I'd have said it's kind of like any random Bluetooth speaker I was using

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the Sonos app to play music stored locally on my phone over Wi-Fi and I was

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a little disappointed playback was stutter-free so for just continuously

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streaming a playlist it was perfect but the app is just not suitable for

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managing even a medium-size music collection its search functionality

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doesn't look in your locally stored fil and even just scrolling through your list of songs is laggy and unresponsive

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so I kept exploring and glory be on

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their website I found out that aside from the usual iOS and Android phone and

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tablet apps they have a desktop app too all right now they've got my attention

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even though they neglected to put an analog input on the things they're letting me legitimately control it from

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anywhere neat back to the app I found some more options you can stream from an

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iTunes library Windows media streamer and even better than that for people

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like me whose music file tags are a mess because they still have music from CDs

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they ripped with music match jukebox they have a folder based navigation

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schema to just pick songs you want to play and cue them up or put them in a

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playlist this is cool because using it this way unlike a Bluetooth speaker your

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Sonos system can keep doing whatever you told it to do even if you get out of

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range or your phone battery dies okay but back to streaming my phone's local

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content again I wanted to try something and turned off my Wi-Fi Midstream it's

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got quite the buffer on it but of course after a little while the music stopped

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then I turned my Wi-Fi back on and Bam music was playing again so at this point

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I was like okay this is actually getting pretty cool depending how you want to

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use it you can make it so that when you get home your music plays to greet you

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and when you go out of range it stops fantastic so next I added the second

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speaker in another room my house has Ethernet and Powerline networking and

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lots of places so I'm still running everything over Ethernet in the next

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video I'll talk about their wireless bridge and the less functionality but

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anyway this is where things started to get really interesting adding another

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speaker is as simple as firing up the app and pressing the buttons again and

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it's connected within seconds you assign your speakers to a room name and now you

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can either play completely different content in each of those places or

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something I figured out how to do with VLC a few years back after a few hours

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of tinkering and a PC hooked up in each speaker location with the click of a

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button you can group them together so the music is perfectly simp in every

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room as you move around your house it's great for staying in your groove when

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you're cleaning and this is exactly how

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I could see myself falling into their trap just keep saving pennies and adding

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speakers until the whole house is hooked up damn what a great product but it

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actually continued to get better I actually just recently finally got

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around to picking up an antenna on Amazon for my receiver so I could listen

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to the radio I'm so old and now that

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feels entirely pointless with Sonos is integrated tune in Internet radio

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support yeah I don't need that anymore the inapp search still sucks but I was

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able to manually navigate to all my favorite stations local and otherwise in

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the searches defense though it does manage to find podcasts like twit so I

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guess it's not totally useless but I still found myself yearning for another

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option the app is okay I mean it's got a four plus star rating on the Play store

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and the advanced options are pretty comprehensive so as a setup tool it's

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fantastic but I was contined to be really disappointed in its lack cluster

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integration with the rest of my Android OS little things like unless it was in

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the foreground pressing my volume up or volume down wouldn't change music but my

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ringtone instead and I found myself really wishing that I could use another

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app for music management and then just stream it by clicking a little button

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like with my Apple TV and after some more digging around I found it now

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clicking add music services in the app just brings up a bunch of layo stuff

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because unlike the rest of the developing World in Canada we don't have

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cool streaming services like Amazon Pandora and Spotify services that appear

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to be what Sonos made these products for but then I discovered the best thing

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ever in the last couple of months two things have happened Google play music

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launched in Canada and Sonos integrated

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it into the Google Music app so you can

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use it exactly the way I wanted you just have something you know running on your

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headphones you press a button boom it's playing over your Sonos system I'm about

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as happy as I could be I actually just signed up for Google music as pre

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musices music's premium service and uh

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it's like the best thing ever I control Music Volume naturally I can properly

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navigate my local content I can stream content it's

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fantastic this is one of those very rare

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products that took about a day to convince me to legitimately change the

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way I go about my daily life not many things can do that but if all this

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sounded like a Sonos commercial up until now I guess this is the part where they

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decide not to slip me that Benjamin for my review after all I strongly disagree

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entirely with sons's use of the term HiFi to describe these speakers I've

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only used the play one and the play three so far but while the speakers

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themselves might actually be fine what Sonos calls warm full-bodied sound is

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apparently equivalent to what I call tuned for the beach generation with

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overdone base a little bit of trouble and a mid-range that goes Way Beyond

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veiled and unfortunately the EQ setting

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are one of the weakest points of the advanced settings within their app so

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with only simple base and treble sliders so I couldn't even really find out if

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the speakers are better than they sound I mean I guess there's good news though

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if you're one of those people who's willing to spend way too much for an

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actual high-i experience with better amps stxs and speakers they're in my

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opinion unjustifiably expensive given they seem to have the same functionality as the other stuff but without an actual

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speaker connect series lets you add your own stuff to your Sono setup but most

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people my myself included likely won't care enough to bother with that expense

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if you're not cranking things up I have to grudgingly admit that the warm sound

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signature works really well for background music which is exactly what I

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personally intend to use my Sonos gear for so I'll probably just stick with the

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speakers and I guess that's it that's how part one of this review ends Sonos

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is gear particularly the software is just so different from other solutions

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that I've tried for managing audio around my home it is such a joy to use

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that throughout the ENT entire experience I was able to enjoy my music

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as I tinkered with it and not once did it frustrate me to the point that I

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needed to stop working on the review and go do something else for a little while something that happens a lot highly

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recommended so far if you've got enough shiny pennies to afford it in part two

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I'll be adding the wireless bridge and some more speakers to the home setup and

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I'll be hooking up their play bar to my media center with a couple of play ones

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linked up as surround speakers let me know if there's anything else that you'd

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like to hear about thanks for watching part one of my Sonos review guys like

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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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