Considering Sonos System

[dcorsus]

Ok, thanks. So what does the bridge do then?

Well I assume(d) you already have a wireless network, otherwise you would need a bridge or a Wireless access point.

I suspect Sonos combining these and giving a "discount" is just marketing

Dirk

[Rupp]

Well I assume(d) you already have a wireless network, otherwise you would need a bridge or a Wireless access point.

I suspect Sonos combining these and giving a "discount" is just marketing

Dirk

Thanks.

[upstatemike]

Ok, thanks. So what does the bridge do then?

The bridge connects your LAN to Sonosnet so Sonos can see music sources and the Internet. If you have a hardwired zoneplayer on your network it will do the bridging and the bridge is not needed. If on the other hand all of your zoneplyers are wireless then you need a bridge plugged into your network so the zoneplayers have a path to your LAN. No sonos component or bridge will connect Sonosnet to your LAN via wifi.

[Rupp]

The bridge connects your LAN to Sonosnet so Sonos can see music sources and the Internet. If you have a hardwired zoneplayer on your network it will do the bridging and the bridge is not needed. If on the other hand all of your zoneplyers are wireless then you need a bridge plugged into your network so the zoneplayers have a path to your LAN.

Ah so you would need the bridge and speaker to get your music library on your HS pc to the wireless speakers.

[upstatemike]

Ah so you would need the bridge and speaker to get your music library on your HS pc to the wireless speakers.

Correct. HS Music library -> LAN -> Bridge -> Sonosnet -> Sonos component. The wireless part is Sonosnet not WiFi.

[Person]

You can do this as well:

HS Music library -> LAN -> Sonos Player 1 -> Sonosnet -> Sonos player 2 3 4 5 ...

Bridge is only needed if you can't use LAN for at least one player.


How well does Sonos work w/ HS?

Is it real-time i.e. can I use it to announce events and wake up notifications? Seems like the answer is <5 second delay, often less.


I am looking for real-time zoned audio (mostly for TTS and .wav playing). If it also does music I will take it!

[sooty]

Are you using Z-Wave? While back I kinda did the same, moved the HS PC (with Z-wave stick) from one side of the house to the other. O boy was that a mistake. Although Z-wave is supposed to route and forward, maybe my gear is old because it wouldn't do anything. I ended up moving the Z-wave stick (USB type controller) to the middle of the house, using an USBoEthernet special device.

So if you do use Z-wave, re-discover and do a few optimizations because all routing tables are now completely wrong.

Dirk

I do use Z-wave but that wasn't the problem. My WiFi router is currently located almost centrally in the house and I have a second access point in the new cabinet via CAT5.

Living in a semi-rural area here in England means that I have a pretty dire ADSL service, so this week I'm having a WiMax service installed to go along side my ADSL using my router's second WAN port. To make cabling easier I was moving the router into the new cabinet and putting the access point in the router's current locaion.

I use 2 RFXCOM LAN units for receiving Oregon and Visonic sensor data. These are both located quite a distance from the HS PC and I don't have CAT5 to these locations so I use two 4 port wireless bridges.

With the router relocated, one of the bridges can no longer see it and of course this is the one that also has my CCTV server on it. Changing the bridges to connect to the access point instead of the router is what's been causing the problems which should be a simple task.

I used to use Ethernet over powerline devices which worked well but in my quest to keep Homeseer and the RFXCOM boxes running in the event of a power outage I moved to WiFi and a series of battery backup devices.

I should bite the bullet and install CAT5 to the 2 RFXCOM locations which would allow me to use POE but to achieve this would require quite a bit of hacking the house apart.

Paul..

[sooty]

Well: This evening I got my first few Sonos devices (Play3, Play5 & Bridge) up and running and I'm quite impressed so far. Setting up the system was about the most painless HA task I have undertaken for quite some time and the sound quality is as good as I need it to be.

I installed the Sonos plug-in which again was a painless experience. All appears to be working just fine with the 2 players including TTS using the speak to file method and the TTS is perfectly synchronised on both players.

How well does Sonos work w/ HS?

Is it real-time i.e. can I use it to announce events and wake up notifications? Seems like the answer is <5 second delay, often less.

As Dirk previously stated, there is a small delay (about 2 seconds here) when compared with speakers connected directly to the HS server. The delay appears to be in the creation / sending of the TTS wave file as when I trigger a speech event I get almost instant muting of the players and then the small delay before the actual speech is heard but I can live with that. Actually this "silence" is probably not such a bad thing because I then know HS has something to say.

I'm not sure just how much of a delay, if any there is on a hard wired multi zone auidio system, but I suspect it must take a few milliseconds for the inputs / outputs and volume levels to be switched for a TTS anouncement.

Paul..

[Person]

Thanks for the info Paul!

Few more questions before I jump in ... they might be obvious to I want to make sure ...

1) Playing .wav is working as well, not just TTS?

2) Do you get explicit control which player does TTS/plays .wav?

I want to be able to run wakeup alarm sounds in a particular room as I am building virtual alarm clocks for each person and one for entire house (that one today rings the door bell :-) since I have no zoned sound and HS PC is downstairs.

[sooty]

Thanks for the info Paul!

Few more questions before I jump in ... they might be obvious to I want to make sure ...

1) Playing .wav is working as well, not just TTS?

2) Do you get explicit control which player does TTS/plays .wav?

I want to be able to run wakeup alarm sounds in a particular room as I am building virtual alarm clocks for each person and one for entire house (that one today rings the door bell :-) since I have no zoned sound and HS PC is downstairs.

I'm still learning so I may be missing something here but playing .wav does not appear as easy as choosing the play WAV event action as you would do with a standard HS /speaker client system however it works just fine using the scripting command hs.speakEx.

As far as I can tell, you can't direct something to a particular player, instead you have to create a link group for each player or group of players that you want to use and then send the TTS or wav to that group.

So, to answer your questions, yes .wav is working and yes it is possible to choose which player(s) are used.

I had a similar setup: HS PC downstairs and no zoned sound. I did have a play with using multiple speaker clients on Windows machines and also using HSTouch for zoned speech, but my biggest gripe with this was the lack of synchronization. Every speaker client would speak at a different time resulting in a mish-mash of sound. This would have been OK if the speakers were located far enough apart so you couldn't hear more than one at once.

Paul..

[gfs]

FWIW Sonos is an awesome product and very versatile. so glad so many have adopted it for HS!