I would like to offer a few thoughts about Sonos as well as describing the solutions I used to make my system fit my needs.
I had originally settled on a Monoprice whole house audio system, because of the cost difference compared to Russound. There were two problems, 1) I didn’t want to cut holes in walls and ceilings, to mount speakers and controls, then run a bunch of wires to make it all work. One of the driving forces was to get a small number of TTS announcements to work throughout the house for important announcements or alerts.
For those not familiar with Sonos, it is an ecosystem that allows any number of wireless clients to be connected via WiFi. These devices can all have individual music sources or be grouped together using a single source. The beauty of grouping is that all clients are synchronized. You can play the same music source in every room and they will remain perfectly synchronized. Music sources can be your own library, Internet feeds like Deezer, Pandora, Amazon, etc. or even the music stored on any iOS device. Sonos has built a robust, flexible and very reliable architecture that is able to connect through your WiFi network or communicate using its own “SonosNet” bypassing traffic through your WiFi network.
Sonos makes speakers, low level audio devices known as “Connect” and amplified versions known as “Connect:Amp”. The Connect:Amp and Connect are stereo devices, the Play speakers are monaural devices, but can be linked as a stereo pair. It is even possible to build a 5.1 channel sound system out of Sonos components.
My brother has been a Sonos advocate for years, so I purchased a Play 3 to try it out. I was initially very pleased with how the mid-range speaker sounded and liked the way the application worked. I added a couple more Play 3s so that I could understand how they grouped, could be controlled by applications and most of all how they would work with Dirk’s plug-in. I was very happy with all aspects, went through a reasonably shallow learning curve with the plug-in and decided this was the route I was going to follow. My wife was thrilled to be able to play music from her phone and a number of other sources anywhere we had a Sonos device. The iOS and PC apps all work similarly and were very easy for my wife to learn, understand and use. Ease of use for the rest of the household is one of the most difficult things to achieve.
With the first experiments proving successful, it was time to think about building out the system. We were very happy, but not thrilled with the sound of the smallish Play 3 speakers, so I purchased a lot of 9 broken Play 5 (Gen 1) speakers. One was missing parts and physically broken internally, so I stripped it and threw it away. I was able to repair 5 of the remaining 8. Each one had a different part failure, but I was able to find replacement parts and make them work. We placed the play 5s around the house and built a nice system. We added a couple of Play 1s in the bathrooms to round it out. TTS announcements worked as needed, the ability to control the system with iOS apps and Dirk’s plug-in were also exactly what we wanted.
This was all completed about the end of October.
Then came the rethink. We have two rooms with nice 5.1 channel surround systems, the master bedroom and the living room. Our basement has a similar setup that is 7.1. All three are powered by Yamaha RX-A3000 series receivers. They have very nice JBL L820 and LC2 center speakers and a Polk sub woofer in the Living Room and Master Bedroom. The Media Room has two sub woofers and additional back speakers. It also has an LED TV for casual watching and a JVC D-ILA projector with a 100" powered screen for movie nights. Setting up a pair of Sonos Play 5s in two of the rooms and a single Play 5 in the master bedroom worked well and sounded surprisingly good, but adding speakers to each room was ugly, did not add to household approval and simply didn’t provide anywhere near the sound quality of the main system. We really liked the Sonos ecosystem, so we wanted to figure this out.
The new plan was to keep Play 1s in 3 locations where music was secondary, but we wanted announcements. The other 6 zones were going to get ZP-120 Connect:Amps. We didn’t want to give up the sound systems in the three rooms, but we also wanted it to be easy to use Sonos from the iOS and other apps. We wanted the receivers and entertainment systems to work as, without intervention from HomeSeer.
We carefully planned out our system, with 9 Sonos zones, 3 with zone players, speakers and subwoofers, my office, our exercise room and my workshop. The three sound system rooms would also get a ZP-120. We chose the Connect:Amp over the Connect, so that we wouldn’t need to have the receivers on in order to play Sonos. The last three zones are the Play 1s.
My next post will go into the final design and solutions. We have now been using it since the beginning of December and really like it.
I had originally settled on a Monoprice whole house audio system, because of the cost difference compared to Russound. There were two problems, 1) I didn’t want to cut holes in walls and ceilings, to mount speakers and controls, then run a bunch of wires to make it all work. One of the driving forces was to get a small number of TTS announcements to work throughout the house for important announcements or alerts.
For those not familiar with Sonos, it is an ecosystem that allows any number of wireless clients to be connected via WiFi. These devices can all have individual music sources or be grouped together using a single source. The beauty of grouping is that all clients are synchronized. You can play the same music source in every room and they will remain perfectly synchronized. Music sources can be your own library, Internet feeds like Deezer, Pandora, Amazon, etc. or even the music stored on any iOS device. Sonos has built a robust, flexible and very reliable architecture that is able to connect through your WiFi network or communicate using its own “SonosNet” bypassing traffic through your WiFi network.
Sonos makes speakers, low level audio devices known as “Connect” and amplified versions known as “Connect:Amp”. The Connect:Amp and Connect are stereo devices, the Play speakers are monaural devices, but can be linked as a stereo pair. It is even possible to build a 5.1 channel sound system out of Sonos components.
My brother has been a Sonos advocate for years, so I purchased a Play 3 to try it out. I was initially very pleased with how the mid-range speaker sounded and liked the way the application worked. I added a couple more Play 3s so that I could understand how they grouped, could be controlled by applications and most of all how they would work with Dirk’s plug-in. I was very happy with all aspects, went through a reasonably shallow learning curve with the plug-in and decided this was the route I was going to follow. My wife was thrilled to be able to play music from her phone and a number of other sources anywhere we had a Sonos device. The iOS and PC apps all work similarly and were very easy for my wife to learn, understand and use. Ease of use for the rest of the household is one of the most difficult things to achieve.
With the first experiments proving successful, it was time to think about building out the system. We were very happy, but not thrilled with the sound of the smallish Play 3 speakers, so I purchased a lot of 9 broken Play 5 (Gen 1) speakers. One was missing parts and physically broken internally, so I stripped it and threw it away. I was able to repair 5 of the remaining 8. Each one had a different part failure, but I was able to find replacement parts and make them work. We placed the play 5s around the house and built a nice system. We added a couple of Play 1s in the bathrooms to round it out. TTS announcements worked as needed, the ability to control the system with iOS apps and Dirk’s plug-in were also exactly what we wanted.
This was all completed about the end of October.
Then came the rethink. We have two rooms with nice 5.1 channel surround systems, the master bedroom and the living room. Our basement has a similar setup that is 7.1. All three are powered by Yamaha RX-A3000 series receivers. They have very nice JBL L820 and LC2 center speakers and a Polk sub woofer in the Living Room and Master Bedroom. The Media Room has two sub woofers and additional back speakers. It also has an LED TV for casual watching and a JVC D-ILA projector with a 100" powered screen for movie nights. Setting up a pair of Sonos Play 5s in two of the rooms and a single Play 5 in the master bedroom worked well and sounded surprisingly good, but adding speakers to each room was ugly, did not add to household approval and simply didn’t provide anywhere near the sound quality of the main system. We really liked the Sonos ecosystem, so we wanted to figure this out.
The new plan was to keep Play 1s in 3 locations where music was secondary, but we wanted announcements. The other 6 zones were going to get ZP-120 Connect:Amps. We didn’t want to give up the sound systems in the three rooms, but we also wanted it to be easy to use Sonos from the iOS and other apps. We wanted the receivers and entertainment systems to work as, without intervention from HomeSeer.
We carefully planned out our system, with 9 Sonos zones, 3 with zone players, speakers and subwoofers, my office, our exercise room and my workshop. The three sound system rooms would also get a ZP-120. We chose the Connect:Amp over the Connect, so that we wouldn’t need to have the receivers on in order to play Sonos. The last three zones are the Play 1s.
My next post will go into the final design and solutions. We have now been using it since the beginning of December and really like it.
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