Sonos ZonePlayer S5 Multi-Room Music System Review

Performance

The 5-speaker system in the Sonos S5 Player is well implemented. Sound quality is excellent. The sound can be cranked up to a very loud level. A manual EQ can be adjusted through the software. This allows you to adjust treble, bass, and balance.

Music played from our music library and Internet services was smooth and stutter-free. The only breakage or stuttering we found was on a few Internet radio stations, which didn’t have perfect feeds.

You can control the Sonos Player in several different ways. You can use the Sonos Desktop Controller software on your computer. You can purchase a Sonos CR200 controller (shown in Figure 11) which comes with a cradle for USD 349. Or you can use an iPod Touch or an iPhone by installing a free Sonos app. All of these work seamlessly.

Figure 11: The Sonos CR200 controller

Sonos did not send a CR200 Controller with our review system, but previous experience with the Sonos controller proved it to be excellent. Having that would be the ultimate controller. However, the iPhone and iPod Touch apps also work quite well. If you use an iPhone to control your Sonos, you can still use it to make and place phone calls and perform other chores. Here’s the rub. If you only have one iPhone, the family member who owns it may have it out of the house when you want to control your Sonos System. Yes, you can still use the computer to control the Sonos, but that may be inconvenient.

The most economical answer fir easy access may be to purchase an iPod Touch to use as a dedicated home controller. Since the Sonos Controller is listed at $349, a $199 iPod touch will be a less costly alternative and will also give you an email and gaming device at the same time.

No matter which controller system you decide to use, you will get excellent control of your music. You can play the same music in all zones or different music in each. You can even control the volume in each room separately.

You can play your whole music collection on the Sonos. As mentioned earlier, you can also play music and audio from many different online music services. It also comes loaded with access to free Internet radio stations. The Internet radio section is especially well-implemented. It lets you easily search for different genres. It also lists local radio stations as well as those in other countries.

You can use the port on the back of the S5 to attach an iPod, CD player or other audio source. Although you may not think that you will use it, we found it to be immediately usable. You can also attach a NAS for even more music storage.

The Sonos supports a large variety of music format including MP3, compressed MP3, iTunes Plus, WMA, AAC, MPEG4, Ogg Vorbis, Audible (format 4), Apple Lossless, Flac (lossless) and uncompressed WAV and AIFF files. If you have older DRM protected iTunes music it will not play on the Sonos. You will have to have Apple upgrade it to the DRM-free version.

The Sonos S5 ZonePlayer lets you setup a queue of music and/or playlists. It also lets you set alarms and/or a sleep time for any zone or zone group. All-in-all, it’s a very capable player.

The only problem that we had with the Sonos was that when the power to our router failed, we had to completely reset the Sonos by going into the software and choosing "Help", the "Reset the Desktop Controller". This forced us to reset the music library and services again! Bummer! If not for this glitch, it would have gotten a Hardware Secrets gold award rather than a slightly lower silver.

Sonos also offers several other products including a ZonePlayer 90 (USD 349 MSRP) and a ZonePlayer 120 (USD 499 MSRP). These are players that can be added to your Sonos system just as you can add additional S5 ZonePlayers. However, these other ZonePlayers require the addition of amplified audio speakers and are pretty pricey. With the excellent sound quality of the S5, you may only want to consider them if you have an expensive speaker system that you want to use.